I had an email from a musician today who said he was struggling a little with the idea of giving away mp3s. It’s a really common issue, and so I thought I’d share my response.
1) You’re not giving away music, you’re giving away RECORDINGS of your music;
2) Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music;
3) Economics works differently for bits than it does for atoms.
Example: I wrote a book called The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (http://newmusicstrategies.com/ebook). You can download it for free. For someone who writes words rather than plays music, that’s like an album.
I’ve never made money out of that book, because I’ve never charged for it. But I’ve certainly made money because of it. That’s a recording of my writing and thinking – not my writing and thinking itself.
It doesn’t cost me anything extra in time, energy, talent or investment whether one person downloads it or ten million people download it. I don’t have to manufacture any more copies. And the more I give it away for free, the more I get to charge for REAL stuff – like my time, my physical presence (speaking engagements, etc), other stuff that I write for print publications (magazines, books, newspapers – even other websites), and so on.
Okay – so it’s not the best analogy in the world – but it helps some people get their heads around the free mp3s thing.
Does that make sense?
My response was intended as provocation, rather than statement of fact (that is: “try thinking about it this way…”) – but actually, this holds true in most cases I’ve encountered.
Of course, there’s a great deal more to be said here – and this is not true for all people in all situations. I’d really appreciate your take on it in the comments. There will be as many people for whom giving away mp3s will not make sense. It depends entirely on your strategy, your audience, the unique characteristics of your music business and musical activities.
But giving mp3s away is a very common practice that not everyone immediately grasps as a viable business strategy.
Be very clear: I said business strategy – not business model. Giving stuff away for free is NOT a business model. You’ll find it very hard to make money if all you do is give things away. But equally it’s very hard to make money UNLESS you give things away.
As usual, Chris Anderson is quite good on this stuff.
Have a great new year, won’t you?
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154 Comments
“Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music”
That’s a great quote and it is the one thing I can take away from this article as gospel. It goes back to the Hear/Like/Buy principle.
Have a great new year!
Andrew, you know how STARVED I was for a new post… lol.
I definitely agree with this. As I emailed you… because of posting my music on Jamendo, the guys at Frostwire (some programmers from Limewire left and created their own application) contacted me about featuring my music IN their p2p application for a limited promotion.
The promotion ran for 5 days and has garnered me 30,000 downloads of my FREE album. Due to the fact that I gave it away… I’m now being contacted by people who want to use my music in dvds, webisodes, etc. This is where I will try to “monetize” my work.
Also off topic, I have to commend Frostwire for supporting indie artists “without charging a fee”. This program is open to all artists and all genres:
http://www.frostclick.com/wp/index.php/promote-your-content/
http://www.frostclick.com/wp/
Hmmm. following the link you offer for your FREE ebook, gives me a page that says “ebook not found.” The statement you are making here regarding giving MP3s for Free is clear, This is your clever way of screaming, “Don’t Do It.”
Entice your readers, but don’t actually give anything away for FREE. Smart!
As a prose writer as well as a songwriter the problem I have with your analogy is that few songwriters will be hired as speakers or in other capacities where they sell something real. The showcase aspect is true, and perhaps if the right people hear your songs you will get songwriting gigs, but if the artist then gives the electrons away there is no money from that either! Since the revenue for a pure songwriter derive only from sales of the “song objects” (Mp3, CD, whatever) how would you apply that. Gigging is out for a lot of composers.
Thank you for sharing these important insights Andrew.
Good music will be shared. Just try and protect it… see what happens! ;-)
Good content attracts attention on the network and music is content.
One example…
I type “music strategies” into Google and up comes your web site in the first place.
Why did Google place it there? Because the people who use the web and Google have decided it’s the best page on that particular keyword.
You provide quality content on your Blog and Google picks up on this and you get attention. You could hide your content behind a login with paid membership and Google won’t show you.
I like what you write about and in turn write about you and your Blog on my Blog and so you get more and more attention.
Will I pay money for any product you produce? Yes. Why?
You have my attention and trust because I know you give a lot of quality information for free on your Blog and in your E-book.
Attention + Trust = Potential Income.
The questions we music creators need to ask ourselves…
How do I use my music to attract as much attention as possible to my business?
How do I gain the trust of those who pay attention to me?
I look forward to reading you in 2009 Andrew. Thank you for all the great work you do.
Happy New Year!
This is a good post, except the first thing that popped in my head while reading your analogy with the ebook is that an ebook costs very little to write, if anything, while an album can cost quite a bit (but clearly doesn’t need to).
Every musician should still sell their music, but allowing some of it to be downloaded freely is not a bad idea. On a recent Christmas album I made, the track we gave away for free to promote the album sold the most. Christmas music sells so quickly, it was very easy to see this work right before our eyes. On my own albums, the tracks I give away on Last.fm and across other blogs tend to sell a little better too, although those albums actually make more album sales than individual track sales (I guess because they’re jazz?).
Many artists have a problem with this concept for a lot of reasons, so I really respect your persistence in supporting this business strategy. I agree, it’s a valid and effective approach to helping artists make a living with music.
Cheers to 2009!
Ed…
A pure songwriter is a nice job if you can get it, though I believe one where only a few people really make an above average income from.
Royalties act as one income source, though a tough one to maintain if you ask me.
You may not want to speak in public or gig though there are other ways of monetizing the knowledge of songwriting you have.
You know a lot about what you do and can therefore create educational content about your craft which attracts attention to you and gets you more exposure in the long run. Attention you can use.
I give this only as an example.
Most of us artists will need to diversify our income sources as not all of us will make it into the few who can do what they love only while still living well.
We should still be living well… ;-)
Ed said what I’m struggling with… Giving away everything is a great strategy if you’re out there touring yr ass off across the country: then you’re making money BECAUSE of yr music. But if you’re a band who isn’t going to tour, it’s tough to convert. Don’t get me wrong, because I don’t HAVE to earn a living from music, I’m more than happy to give it away so that people can hear it (better than them not hearing it). We currently have 2 of 8 tracks downloadable for both our albums and both are fully streamable on last.fm. I struggle with this every day, I’ve been close to pulling the trigger on making all our tracks downloadable many times. At this point though, I’m reaching out to MP3 blogs and trying to link to our last.fm stream wherever possible. Maybe it’ll convert to T-shirt sales?
I agree with Cameron…
… your music costs a lot to create, and just being able to create music takes a long time. All the more reason to make money BECAUSE of it! ;-)
You wrote…
“On a recent Christmas album I made, the track we gave away for free to promote the album sold the most.”
This is a good reminder that you can give away and sell the same music. In fact giving it away will even help you sell more of it.
I think this may be part of what Andrew refers to with…
“3) Economics works differently for bits than it does for atoms.”
All the best!
Marius,
No one was talking about an above average income. And the fact that it is hard isn’t really the issue. The best things require effort. And investment. The problem is when there is no way to recoup that investment. If recordings are made available for free, then that cuts out a substantial portion of the possible income stream. There are still music licensing opportunities, but I don’t see what the songwriter (as opposed to a performer) gets out of giving away recordings. In a limited way it makes sense, to promote your songwriting skills. I give away demos all the time. But eventually someone will need to pay mechanicals or the song get airplay before there is any income from the thing, the real thing, I do.
Most of the people that are going to download your music for free probably weren’t going to buy it anyway. And I’m guessing, because I don’t really have much evidence, that the more people that listen to your music the more other people will hear it, and the more people will seek it out. Some fraction of those people will end up buying it, and whatever that fraction might be, it’s on top of whatever your own marketing or promotion efforts will yield.
That’s the only way I can explain the sales results of the tracks I give away.
It helps to start with a good song and have a big internet presence.
Marius:
“Attention + Trust = Potential Income”
That’s it in a nutshell really, awesome!
@Cameron
I agree with you. I garnered 30,000 downloads through Frostwire. If I can get even 5000 people to cough up $5 for my next paid release… I would have made $25.000. A nice piece of change.
But that’s also a big “IF”
My provocative point with people is usually that it’s OK to give up on the word ‘free’ so long as they also give up on the idea that the only currency is money…
downloads have transactional value – you exchange something for it, be it time, engagement, an email address, etc… you can ask for help in exchange for freebies given to your mailing list and encourage them to share them as ‘gifts’ to their friends. Presents aren’t ‘free’ even if you didn’t pay for what you’re passing on – you’re putting something on the line when you say that an entity is worth sharing…
We just need to work harder to invest some kind of cultural value into what we do…
FWIW, I quite often have people on my site paying for downloads they could get elsewhere legally for free. That’s always nice :)
Happy new year, andrew.
Ed, I can see how it works different for the songwriter who depends on purely on units sold for income.
“If recordings are made available for free, then that cuts out a substantial portion of the possible income stream.”
In the short run this is true, in the long run the reverse may just be true. No attention means no possible income stream.
People are learning to expect free. Youtube, Last.fm, MySpace are all places where we get free music.
The important thing for the songwriter is to make sure you get credited when and where the music is given away AND get paid when the music is sold.
The artist may not even give away the music. If it’s good and recorded it will be ripped and uploaded by someone else.
You can at least, when the recording artist gives it away, ensure you get credit which results in attention.
You can not arrange this type of credit when some anonymous person uploads the tracks so you do not even get the attention which may result in credibility and income in future.
It pays to therefore Support artists who make the business decision of officially providing what is going to be “unofficially” available in any case. People tend to go for the official free download if they can.
“But eventually someone will need to pay mechanicals or the song get airplay before there is any income from the thing, the real thing, I do.”
Yes, I agree. I feel the chances for new songwriters getting paid are better when they have a good name in the business so in the long run the strategy of artists giving away tracks will result in more work for the songwriter and more income.
It may be to early to say…
The more you give away the more you sell.
I can see however how giving away music can get you attention and how, in today’s overcrowded music marketplace attention is the first mountain to conquer. Income only becomes possible once you have enough attention and trust.
Giving away music in the right way attracts attention and builds trust in the short-term which allows artists and songwriters to build trust in the long-term.
I feel the viable income sources are shifting to live music and music education and away from selling units. Songwriters should be especially aware of this fact looking forward.
What do you think?
And on that note, isn’t it interesting that no matter how fast and loose people play with copyright in terms of giving music away for free – even if there’s not any hope of financial reward for the artist – so-called ‘pirates’ will always go to great lengths to give proper attribution.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a song on the internet that isn’t credited to the performing artist.
I would underline … give away YOUR music as much as you want. However, if you didn’t write the songs you are giving away … or if you have employed a producer or union musicians and singers to make your recordings … or if you are thinking about giving away recordings you have made for someone else – and they own the rights – you had better get their approvals before making the move of distributing rights you don’t own.
I would also suggest that you NEVER give away any of YOUR RIGHTS to the music (songs and/or recordings) you have created and own out right.
Copyright law gives you the right to do anything you want with your music … give it away, charge for it, protect – or not protect – your interests as you see fit.
Don’t get sucked into the Lessig / Creative Commons / EFF traps that may sound enticing to those newbie creators who don’t fully understand copyright law. All of that beautifully constructed double speak rhetoric spouted by Lessig and his disciples is designed to strip you of your rights, and, therefore, your ability to protect yourself at a time you may wish to do so.
Creators who work to weaken copyright law thinking that doing so will provide them with more opportunities are actually working against themselves by trying to strip away the very rights that provide them with those opportunities.
You have total freedom to give away anything you have created and own. Most of us did exactly that when we started out. What we never gave away were the rights to get paid and protect ourselves if we ever wanted to …
The only things that have changed in the digital age are the technologies used to produce and market our creations and the avenues of distribution … none of which have any relationship whatsoever to the rights granted to us by law.
Marius,
Thanks for the response. It is an interesting time and it will be fascinating to follow what approaches work in the end, and which fail. It might even be that roles are disappearing. Perhaps the concept of pure songwriter will be as useful as “tinker”. Just as there are still furriers (people who do horseshoeing) tinkers still exist, I imagine. But their place in the culture has changed dramatically.
One point to ponder / explain to me – “Songwriters” as in the folks who write the songs “that make the whole world sing” (sorry, Barry Mannilow possessed me) – but seriously: Songwriters – aren’t they paid when the performance artists / producers / managers decide to use their song in a recording or performance? Isn’t there a sum of money paid up-front upon deciding to use a song?
I was under the impression that there are of course residual royalty checks (but we all know those are normally chump change, and have been since recorded music ever payed) – But doesn’t the bulk of a songwriters pay come from the initial “Deal”? The actual “Sale” of the written song to the company / artist that is going to use it?
Please tell me if I am wrong.
Now to another point and possible misunderstanding (by me):
“Creators who work to weaken copyright law thinking that doing so will provide them with more opportunities are actually working against themselves by trying to strip away the very rights that provide them with those opportunities.”
“Weaken” – “Strip away” ?? I really don’t get that. Ownership is ownership – you go through the motions, you get your ‘paper work’ in order and you own your music.
Now who plays it, where it is played, who is getting paid for it, etc. etc. – Shouldn’t it be each of our own individual “problems” and not “the industries problem”? Not the “system that is in place” problem?
I guess my lack of comprehension or understanding is due to the lack of successful artists (Pro’s) – posting here declaring how they are being robbed of their livelihood by the “Digital Shift”.
I see way to many smart people here (Steve Lawson being just one) who mention that they get payed downloads as well as free downloads for their music. This implies to me that this type of person has taken ownership of their art and their situation.
Most of the complainers about how the digital music environment is screwing them – are equivalent to crack whores complaining that life is not fair because there are other, prettier girls making better money off of the “Escort” business. (Pitiful analogy maybe?) – Point is:
Choice. (and a healthy dose of personal responsibility)
Entitlement is the enemy right along side saturation. Just because you sell your body (= music/art) does not mean you are automatically entitled to the same money/opportunity as all others doing so.
Don’t be a crack head entitlement rock star wannabe. Be a sexy, smart hot artist with the brains and the know how to navigate, exploit and capitalize on your ASSets.
Control your destiny and quit waiting for the hand-out. And for god’s sake: Please Stop Confusing “FILE SHARING” with “PIRACY”.
I believe copyright will always exist and I also believe that there will be countless artists out there who will NOT manage theirs and in turn feel slighted by their chosen profession. (And for any artist that has not accepted file-sharing – and NOT Piracy – as the norm – well, sorry for you guys).
Gosh, been a while since I have had a rant – I cannot wait to hear of all the ways I am wrong about this!
Milton,
Songwriters aren’t paid up front unless it is a work for hire (in which case there are no royalties) although there are mechanicals paid through the publisher (who gets half, typically). This amount is a statutory amount, and will depend on the number of copies of CDs being made (so it sucks for downloads). The bulk of the income comes through PROs (ASCAP, BMI, STIM, etc) and is paid to the writer directly for performances that they happen to know about.
@ED – much thanks for the clarification! I had a clue to some of that but thank you for the specifics.
I compose music for soundtracks, scores, cues and underscores for film, TV and multi-media projects in general. I get paid a fee once a song is chosen, then I am paid additional money for additional production costs (which rarely happens because my submitted mixes are usually 100%), then there is a fee paid for each placement of the song (i.e.; once in ‘this’ show, once in ‘that’ movie, etc. etc.), and then come the residual royalties for commercials and regularly repeated uses (via – BMI for me).
I guess the “Piracy / File Share” confusion is not really an issue at all for me – And for the self indulgent music I make for playing to dance floors, chill rooms or head phones – well I just really, really enjoy making music and it makes me happy just to see others enjoy it too. Thanks to the composition work – money from club kids is the least of my worries.
Lucky me?
I still stand by my belief that the VAST majority of bitchers and whiners about making money from their “art” – These are people waiting for a hand-out…And they will jump on any opportunity to blame anyone but themselves for their own failures.
Entitlement -rock-star-wannabe’s – Keep coming around to places like NMS and MTT and keep reading – get schooled or get played for a fool.
I’m glad you included this paragraph:
“I said business strategy – not business model. Giving stuff away for free is NOT a business model. You’ll find it very hard to make money if all you do is give things away. But equally it’s very hard to make money UNLESS you give things away.”
Too many people misconstrue ‘free’ and ‘strategy’.
I think it’s a wonderful idea. Obviously it can’t be the only thing you do, but giving your music away could lead to more recognition, merchandise sales, and gigs.
My typical reservation here is: so what line of business are you in, exactly?
(This is what Ed Teja is talking about, among other things.)
If you’re a musician, you should be making money playing/writing/recording music. If you aren’t, then you’re obviously in a different business. Andrew is an educator, so his free e-book (and this blog) are in effect advertising for his educational or consultation services. If, however, he were to perform those services for free, it would simply be bad business on his part.
There’s nothing wrong with treating music as a hobby, but for goodness sake, if you aspire to making it a business (even if only a part-time one), think of it as business and that means having at least an elementary grasp of the economics involved.
Oh and Andrew, you cannot sell your music however hard you try, there is simply no such thing that could be the object of a transaction. So the distinction about giving your recordings away is just muddying the waters. It so happens, that recordings are one of the few media in which you can, in effect, sell (=monetise) your music and by far the one with the widest reach. Once you lose that income stream, your options become pretty limited and your outlook fairly bleak.
(Yes, I can justify the above statement, with calculations if necessary.)
All right. I’ll bite.
Let’s have your calculations then…
@TonsoTunez – could you please clarify: do you think Lawrence Lessig is evil, or do you think he’s stupid?
Clearly you think it’s one of those, but I can’t tell which.
@KRYZ
“Once you lose that income stream, your options become pretty limited and your outlook fairly bleak”
???
My own circumstance says bullocks to that.
Is there just a general lack of ability to understand the compromises involved in the many avenues of a musical career? There seems to be an “All or None” mentality at work on both sides of the issue.
Is anything labeled a ‘strategy’ anything less than a mindful and consistent understanding of circumstances and a plan to navigate towards success?
You can’t just make music and then decide that although you have put forth all this effort to establish a distribution network – “Hey, no one is paying for my music so the system is broken” – It’s adapting to it not fighting it (not always).
I guess I am getting back to just being bothered by pessimists and nay-Sayers. It is just fine to see the problems with things and even to complain a little about it – but I find it much more productive to close your arguments with possible solutions.
I am a little fish but I am feeding just fine.
I guess I don’t understand what naysaying you refer to Milton. I was asking a question about how a songwriter would profit in this strategy. I agree with KRZYS (aw forget it) that what your career is makes a difference. The many avenues of a music career may or may not be open to every individual by aptitude or temperament. I perform, for instance, but that is not what I am best at. I record, I do compositions, I play several instruments. But what I want to do is write songs. This isn’t about not compromising, but about figuring out where a desire to be a songwriter fits into a business strategy that says give the recordings away (which I don’t control) and make your money from something else. This means the question on the table is, from what else? If you are salesman on commission and you are told to give the goods away, how would you earn a living, especially given that you love selling. That is my counter analogy to Dubber’s.
Again I am not suggesting that “this I will do and no other” but inquiring what the role of songwriter is in Dubber’s view of the new reality. I heartily agree that the paradigm is changing and feel it is uncertain yet what it is changing to. That is what is interesting.
I’d put a slight twist on your last comment, Ed. The paradigm is changing, and uncertainty is what it is changing into.
I don’t believe in a ‘new model’ that we will somehow miraculously settle into after some period of confusion. Complexity increases. This is why I’m so skeptical about futurology when it comes to this stuff – because “In the future, we will all…” nothing. We won’t all do anything other than find ways of making a living that suit our own unique circumstances, audiences and material.
I do happen to believe that among musicians, songwriters are, and seem likely to remain, in the best position of all – but that synchronisation, public performance, commissioned works and having other, more famous people perform your songs seems to be the more lucrative strategies around.
None of those things are ever easy to attain, but if I was a songwriter, selling mp3s would not be my first – and would certainly not be my only plan.
@Dubber: I thought you might and it’s lucky, too, because I’m just in the process of starting a major analytical project based on everything I’ve read over the past year or so, plus research intended as a basis for my PhD thesis.
You’ll forgive me if I use my own blog for presenting the results – I really don’t want to swell these comments with extraneous information.
@Milton: The point is that your career is what you make money doing. If you don’t make money from your recordings, then what you have is in effect an expensive hobby that may or may not help in your career. The economics have not changed. Your bottom line is what matters in the end and investing in recordings just for the sake of making them does not help your bottom line.
But Krzysztof – you’re assuming Milton is a maker and wholesaler of mp3s, when in fact he’s a musician.
A lot of people confuse those two things and it imposes a manufacturing frame on the business of musicianship, which is clearly nonsense. It assumes that a guitar or a piano is no more than merely a tool for making recorded products.
Which is fine – if that’s all you can think of to do with that particular piece of machinery, but it’s not where all the money is to be made, would be my simple point.
Dubber,
I think we agree on the future. I happen to be a big fan of uncertainty! As H.L. Mencken pointed out: “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.” I think, however, that is why I resist panaceas, such as “you need to give mp3s away.” But selling mp3s is not the province of the songwriter either. It is a wonderful time to emphasize the creativity that we (as artists) seem to think we have in abundance. And, although I’d use different terminology than Milton does, his point of not looking for an industry model, but rather creating an individual one, is certainly valid. Personally, I am working to find artists that I think have potential, who like my songwriter, and trying to develop some synergy. Together we might offer something people want. How money is made from that in the future is something that will evolve. We be keeping on!
Thanks for raising the issue on this site, man.
Dubber…
Lessig is clearly not stupid. In fact, his mission to dismantle creator’s rights is quite cleaver until you start dissecting it point by point which many have – and continue to do – including the US Supreme Court.
Irrational rhetoric cleverly delivered by dedicated deviates has lead to some of the world’s most disastrous outcomes.
Attempting to destroy the rights of creators is not an admirable objective no matter how ingeniously you distort the facts to make your point.
Two things – 1):
“@Milton: The point is that your career is what you make money doing. If you don’t make money from your recordings, then what you have is in effect an expensive hobby that may or may not help in your career. The economics have not changed. Your bottom line is what matters in the end and investing in recordings just for the sake of making them does not help your bottom line” – KRZYS
And 2):
“But Krzysztof – you’re assuming Milton is a maker and wholesaler of mp3s, when in fact he’s a musician.” – Dubber
….But to refer back to KRZYS comment to me – This tunnel vision you have about musical careers -vs- hobbies is way to restricting. How can YOU expect to even begin to comprehend different “strategies” about monetizing music if the choices (as you seem to have determined them to be) are so black and white?
For the future rock stars of the world – Look, the competition already getting airplay is FIERCE (not good music always but) it is thick as thieves and the public – pop star makers – know what they want (and most of it is crap IMO)….Ah yes, my point:
A career in music based on “Popular” appeal and mass unit sales is a hard road indeed…But it is not the ONLY career in music to be had.
In fact – a career solely in music is a hard road indeed. I have managed to combine my love of music with my general love of creativity and when i offer myself up to a music supervisor or company, I also make sure they know what else I can do (musically and creatively).
Honestly this has worked for me. I have written songs and created graphics at the same time for the same music supervisor. It certainly doesn’t hurt to be more than just a guy who plays only one instrument.
Tunnel vision, short sightedness, saturation and entitlement-rock-star-wannabe’s are all the enemy.
(It is in each of us to learn and adapt – just like when we were very young and just beginning to make friends – learn what works and what doesn’t, who gives and who takes – adapt and prosper).
PS – I must have way to much time on my hands to be writing all this!
OH! And also – @KRZYS -
The investment in my recordings is essentially a “Paid Once” and done with it thing. I own all the gear, I record all the music myself. I can store the mp3′s, I can burn the CD’s / DVD’s
My bottom line disappeared about a year after I put my studio together.
Maybe music is my hobby? And I just happen to make money from it! Sweet!
We are giving our last EP away for free and using Twitter a fair bit
The response has been great , and many of our new fans are actually pestering their friends to buy our stuff through iTunes and more ‘legit’ services. They are also keen to know when we’re gigging.
The free downloads are being used by the tech savvy people to spread the word and increase the fanbase, and these people are then passing on the idea of purchasing our stuff
This is just ‘what happens’. You don’t need to tell anyone what to do or how to act. The people who appreciate what you do act responsibly, and those who don’t fall by the wayside.
Faith required.
People can BUY signed copies of our EP, go to iTunes and lots of other places, and then there’s merch and other stuff. We are always looking for ways to create more personalised products which are seperate from downloads.
Free downloads are the new radio. Get used to it, and get over thinking of downloads as monetisable. Worrying about lost money from downloads is a huge red herring.
Spend your time worrying about how to get your music in the hands of as many people as possible. Promotions for big acts cost millions. Your cost of promotion is the price of not charging.
You get a huge bang for the buck giving out free downloads as a promotional tool. Don’t stand in the way of your own success by cutting off access to certain tracks or making it too difficult to get content.
You can recoup your costs later when you’re better known. And of you don’t get better known, then you wont have lost anything because it’s obvious that you can’t't even give your music away!
My advice is take a deep breath and embrace free. If you’re any good, all the other things you do that aren’t free will make you money. The biggest way to increase your income is to expand your reputation.
@TonsoTunez
So… evil then.
So here’s the bit I can’t work out. If Lessig is, as you claim, smart but evil – what on earth do you imagine his purpose to be?
I mean… if he is indeed a “dedicated deviate” who is “attempting to destroy the rights of creators”, I have to wonder – to what end? Or is deviant behaviour its own reward?
Your assertion that “his mission [is] to dismantle creator’s (sic) rights” makes no sense at all to me, and actually I wonder if the simpler explanation is that he’s trying to do some good to reform a system of copyright (remember, he’s not out to abolish it) in order to make it fairer for all, and so that its purpose – to incentivise creativity and enrich culture – can be met.
In other words… given the choice between Lessig as:
- Stupid and just plain wrong
- Evil and out to ruin musicians
- Merely deviant and perverse
or
- Probably right, and most likely doing some good
Occam’s razor suggests that option 4 is probably the right one. The other conclusions seem rather paranoid, somewhat delusional and kind of spiteful.
Remember – just because something is no longer unfair in your favour, that doesn’t mean that it’s not fair.
@Julian
“Spend your time worrying about how to get your music in the hands of as many people as possible. Promotions for big acts cost millions. Your cost of promotion is the price of not charging.”
That was just great.
And my own input concerning Lessig:
He was featured on NPR (National Public Radio) recently and I was extremely encouraged and impressed with him. Andrew’s perception that he is “Probably right, and most likely doing some good” is spot on (based on what I heard in the interview).
And I think what a lot of musicians here may miss about Lessig is that he is NOT a music professor / scholar. My understanding is that he is more along the lines of a “business culture / human culture” kind of professor.
I back this up with the mans own words in regards to his next ten year endeavor: To take on corruption in the political arena.
“To what end?” – I believe the answer is right in front of our faces. I believe Lessig wants to create as transparent and “fair” a business and political culture as possible in a (now) digitally driven world of commerce and communication.
But as always – I could be very wrong. Someone will tell me if they think so, I am sure of that.
PS – I can not wait to see what happens with Lessig over the next ten years! (hopefully he will not be jailed as a revolutionary!)
Lessig’s a law professor at Stanford. Here’s his bio.
Not just an agitator for copyright reform, he’s a campaigner against political corruption and an expert on constitutional law.
The actor Christopher Lloyd played Lessig in an episode of The West Wing.
I’ve met Lessig (and Lloyd too, coincidentally) – and you know… I just can’t picture him plotting dastardly ways to keep independent musicians from making a decent living.
Dubber wrote: “Remember – just because something is no longer unfair in your favour, that doesn’t mean that it’s not fair.”
I don’t buy the Lessig premiss that you have apparently swallowed hook, line and sinker … Copyright law in not, and has never been, unfair when it comes to the rights of creators.
You seem to be saying that copyright law is ‘fair’ because it is approved of by the group of people who ‘matter’. Seriously? That’s what you mean by fair?
I’d also be interested to know what you think the ‘Lessig Premise’ is that I’ve accepted without question.
If it’s that copyright law was designed to fit set of circumstances that have radically changed since then, and that it warrants some re-examination in the light of new technologies and social practice – then yeah. I’m completely sucked in by that idea.
How uncritical of me.
I sense a huge dis-connect happening here.
As if the copyright issue was “all or none” or “black and white”???
The gray areas are the stuff that binds all diplomacy, responsibility, and evolution.
IMO:
Copyright will not be abolished (that’s the “none”) and neither will it be a dust covered golden tune never to be heard because it was locked away by a copyright that had outlived it’s owners (that’s the “all”).
Can’t we just all get along? (or rather: Get on…)
Dubber: Technical circumstances have changed, the rights creators should be entitled to have not.
Lessig, and apparently you, wish to revise copyright law to deprive creators of their option to assert their rights should they so chose. This is especially unfair to independent creators as our world shifts to one that will be substantially more open to what they have to offer.
You write: “I just can’t picture him (Lessig) plotting dastardly ways to keep independent musicians from making a decent living.”
As with Lessig, you never define the term ‘decent living.’ But, let me tell you what I personally heard Larry Lessig’s college, Eben Moglen, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and author of The dotCommunist Manifesto) say to a large gathering of independent musicians at the very first Future Of Music Conference in Washington D.C., [this is paraphrased] “Musicians better stake out a street corner somewhere, play their little tunes and hope passersby throw money in their open instrument cases because that’s all they will ever see once the Internet gets through with them.”
Continue advocating the diminution of creator’s rights in locked step with Larry Lessig … and you will have a front row seat as Professor Moglen’s prophecy comes to pass.
That’s ‘colleague’ not ‘college’
Since the entire industry is shifting…wouldnt it make sense to re-negotiate the terms in which songwriters monetize? Perhaps a new business model in general..? If not I see it becoming how the gentlemen above stated…tinkers and horsehoe makers.
I have a friend (colleague) who thinks all black people are inferior.
I disagree completely with him.
I’m curious how the advent of creative commons changes copyright law. From the way I have heard it explained in many sources, it complements copyright law by providing prenegotiated rights contracts–the same as I might do in signing a work for hire or other special contract. But these are standardized. You can keep the rights if you wish. I haven’t seen anything that says it would change copyright law, just that creators have more options. Options should be a good thing. Rather than labelling it a diabolical scheme, can you explain specifically which rights under copyright law would be negated by CC? (I am not being sarcastic..I would love to hear if know something about it that I haven’t heard elsewhere.) I have read the material and heard Lessig talk on the subject in a video.
@Ed Teja
You’re exactly right. Creative Commons is a middle ground of ‘Some Rights Reserved’ between the ‘All Rights Reserved’ of standard copyright and the ‘No Rights Reserved’ of public domain works.
Copyright is about permission. No Rights Reserved means that people can use a work how they like and they don’t have to seek permission. All Rights Reserved means that nobody can do anything of any kind with the work without seeking permission first. Some Rights Reserved means that the creator of the work has a legal framework for pre-granting permission for certain types of usage (for instance, for non-commercial use) without having to be asked each time.
This blog is under a CC licence. It’s an Attribution, Non-Commercial licence. If you want to republish it in your family newsletter, then that’s fine by me as long as you say it’s by me, and you don’t charge for the newsletter. If you want to publish and sell a book made up of my writing from this site, then we have to have a conversation.
A CC licence gives me a really sensible, robust and clear-cut method of doing that, where none existed before. It’s a choice I can now make, and it’s one I’ve gladly opted for.
@TonsoTunez
1) Revision of copyright law does not mean abolition. I agree with you that copyright abolition is a really dumb idea. But fixing something that is broken does NOT mean throwing it away.
2) Moglen is a really smart man. Thanks for bringing him up. From what I know of him (though I’m more familiar with Lessig’s work) – that sounds more like a timely warning than a threat to me. Moglen is particularly interested in the Free Software Movement. And rightly so. My hunch is that you’ve heard his words in the same paranoid way you’ve heard mine.
3) I don’t understand how your brain has turned ‘here is a strategy that you might wish to use in order to give yourself a competitive advantage in the 21st century’ into ‘advocating the diminution of creator’s rights’. It’s like you’re reading my words through some sort of sinister filter.
Let me try this in really simple terms:
The world has changed. Not all of it for the better. The new environment contains challenges and new obstacles. The ways in which you used to operate don’t all work in the new environment. My intention is merely to explain that, and point out some new strategies to try that other people have found work for them.
In the meantime, the laws that we use to encourage the creation of works through financial incentive are inadequate and become more irrelevant over time. This is not because rewarding creativity is unimportant – but because those laws only describe about a third of the activities that currently go on – possibly much less. In order to operate in any sensible fashion, those laws must be brought up to date.
The best way to do that is holistically. For copyright law to be fair, one needs to understand the technology, understand how people use it, understand how culture is created and disseminated in all its complexity, and understand how the economics of all that works on both a macro and a micro level.
Only then can you create laws that are fair, just and rational – and which incentivise the creation of works, promote the creation and dissemination of culture and fairly reward the creators of those works.
So which copyright are we talking about here anyway? Many copyrights exist in a recording and to not ackowledge which ones are under discussion may obfuscate the issue.
@Dubber Btw I felt Lessig came over as a berk in that episode of the West Wing.
Copyright for composers provides the choice and the protection to do whatever with your work. A panacea solution to the problem of pushing your music to a public isn’t the way. What is useful for one garage rock band may not suit another due to location, style and other factors.
Retain your rights and make informed choices. I know one thing, opinions are firmly held and no-one is changing their mind soon.
Hang on.. who said panacea? I’m talking about strategies, not magic jellybeans.
I’m (mostly) with you, Andy. You should do what suits your circumstances – and you’re just as much of an idiot if you throw the baby out with the bathwater as you are if you don’t try things that could well turn out to be to your advantage.
It doesn’t alter the fact that copyright law is in desperate need of a major overhaul.
As a super poor music lover, I am totally embracing the practice of giving away mp3s. Unless you have infinite time and money, it’s hard to keep up with the many wonderful and talented bands out there. How do you choose one over another if you haven’t heard much from them? I’ve come to rely on free downloads to discover new music. And, once I’ve heard it and fallen in love, I’m always quick to buy the album or concert tickets.
It’s interesting that Lessig moves on from dealing with Intellectual Property Rights, to attempt to resolve the corrupting influence on government.
Creative Commons provides options and acknowledges the value of Copyright without resorting to the one-size-fits-all type approach that fails to recognise that a few things have changed.
On the subject of giving things away.
So a musician creates a piece of music, why should that musician not pay a fair & reasonable price for the right to assert his/her rights an author? (ie What price does that musician pay for the rights of protection?) It seems that to provide protection for a lengthy period for free is unreasonable and that there is little possbility for the market to determine what is a fair exchange where the terms were long ago set. IMO, a shorter period of protection initially, backed up by the right to seek extension via the mechanism of user-pays would perhaps provide balance, though lose a lot of the elegance that Copyright once had.
A composer does pay. Although some copyright protection is free, copyright registration is not, and enforcing a copyright requires the owner to get expensive legal help and go through courts. And, if you believe in intellectual property, what is the reasonable basis for having to pay for rights to something you created? Creation is work and you should benefit from the work you do. Maybe copyright is a faulty answer, but it provides some protection.
Hi Andrew,
I found your blog via Chris Brogan’s post: No Comment.
I have a friend active in music, looking for means to “monetize” his talent, which is not that easy. He’s 50 and I have the feeling that it is not easy to dive into new models. He says that trying to promote your music through social media/tools is very time consuming and he prefers dedicate that time to ..music!!
I’m glad to see people like you thinking about new ways and trying to help musicians!
I’ll forward him your blog!
@Claudiafalt
As one of the founding members of cllct.com–a website created to host creative commons-licensed music–I agree 100%. Glad to hear someone else weigh in on the issue, though I think it’s just a matter of time before everyone starts to see it this way.
Dan Aguayo wrote: “wouldn’t it make sense to re-negotiate the terms in which songwriters monetize?”
Having RIGHTS enables the ability to reconfigure how things get monetized. Remove those rights from the law and the basis for negotiation goes with them.
The fundamental thing that every creator needs to understand is that nobody WANTS to pay you. Consumers don’t want to pay you. Users of your music who profit because your music exists don’t want to pay you. This is nothing new. It predates, by centuries, the coming of the digital age. The battle for rights, including the right to get paid if you so desire, has been never ending.
Creators who willingly forgo their right to defend themselves – or enable others to take their rights away do a great disservice no only to themselves; but more importantly, to the public that enjoys the broad array of music the existence of strong copyright protection has provided for the last century.
@Laura If you want some free mp3s from a band who aren’t worried about ‘giving away’ their music, follow my link, always nice to have the chance to let someone know what we do
@Tonso Lessig has interesting ideas, but in many ways he is just plain wrong. The idea of musicians are all going to be poor is just ridiculous as he seems to be coming from the notion that all income is based on sales, which has never been the case as you well know. So I have no idea why he bothers to make these stupid overgeneralised statemements.
Regarding the copyright thing, copyright law has changed and moved with the times. There used to not be recorded music, and previous laws on copyright had to be expanded and revised to meet the new media. Copyright law needs to keep developing and expanding to meet the demands of both consumers and producers. I think that is all anyone is arguing here.
I could put a sign up on my website telling people that if they wanted to have our mp3′s I would have to have it in triplicate that they wouldn’t pirate our stuff. Wouldn’t get me very far. The RIAA have alienated many consumers, it can be just as easy for artists to do that – you are up against public opinion and what the public feels to be right. CC is a good example of an internet-useful copyright concept.
We have the closed, the shareable, and the open. Shareable is a product of the internet era. It isn’t going away, so here we have something we all understand to help people share without removing our rights as performers.
Just to be clear, as far as I can tell, Lessig didn’t say anything about musicians ending up poor as a logical extension of the internet. Tonso said that he heard Moglen say it, but I get the feeling he was doing some creative interpretation at the time.
In fact, I know I get criticised for simply swallowing everything Lessig has to say on copyright uncritically – but I’m yet to find a factual error or a logical flaw in what he says. That’s not to say there aren’t any – just that I haven’t found them.
Has anyone else here actually read Lessig’s books and articles and can point me to some of the more problematic material? Or are we just pretty much making stuff up to support our strongly held opinions…?
My work involves listening to a lot of new music by a lot of independent artists, who have wildly differing attitudes regarding the value of their own music. At one extreme some performers only feature short clips of their songs on their MySpace page for fear of losing record sales if fans are allowed to hear the whole thing for free. At the other end of the spectrum are artists who proudly announce they’re releasing their new EP or album as a free download from their website. Some will even mail a CD-R of their work to anyone who wants one, anywhere in the world, free of charge.
But both extremes strike me as misguided. The Record Industry is in crisis with single sales dropping through the floor. How many extra units do people honestly expect to sell as a result of NOT putting the full version of their ‘A’Side on MySpace. Twenty? Two hundred? It sure as hell won’t be two thousand.
By the same token if you’ve invested time and money in making an album, then offering to mail free CDs to anybody who wants one sends out completely the wrong message. (Can their music be any good if they’re that keen to to give it away for nothing?) Other people won’t value your work if you don’t appear to ascribe any value to it yourself.
Which is why my advice to every independent artist would be NOT to blindly give their music away free to all comers. Instead release your recordings sparingly in the form of singles, EPs and albums – using Tunecore and AWAL – exactly as you would if you had a record company. Put together mini tours, videos and promotional campaigns to support every release – even if the tour is only local pubs and the video shot with a mobile phone.
The more seriously artists treats their own work the more seriously other people will take it. A series of full commercial releases gives you a better chance of airplay at radio. It also gives you a discography. Note that this isn’t about shifting units – any actual sales income will be a small bonus. It’s about credibility, building up a body of work and establishing a fanbase.
With this in mind, artists should (in my view) definitely put their single and best album tracks up on MySpace in full. This isn’t the same as giving music away free – instead think of MySpace plays not as lost sales, but as airplay. Yes, people can grab your MySpace audio for free if they really want to. But if Radio 1 played a track of yours on heavy rotation, people could grab that off the radio for free as well. The benefits far outweigh the risks.
So if we expect low sales and turn a blind eye to filesharing, how will we earn an income from our music in the future? From the same place artists have always earned their income – from your fanbase. Traditionally, 95% of the money a fan paid for your album went to record retailers, wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, publishers, managers and record company shareholders in any case.
So stop searching for that elusive deal, cut out the middlemen and devote serious thought and energy instead to building a loyal following. Write those blogs, answer those emails, gather those addresses, build that database, nurture that goodwill. Above all keep writing those great tunes. Building a fanbase is simple enough – all you have to be is good and the word will spread.
Jono McCleery was broke when trying to record his album, and emailed fans for donations. Kat Flint did the same. Both raised the money and both albums were superb. In future, great artists may never numerically match the album sales of the bad old days. But they’ll see a damn sight more money for each unit sold.
And great music will always arouse the same passionate loyalty in their core audience – as sales of Radiohead’s £40 “In Rainbows” box set proved. For a few thousand dollars well-heeled US fans can book the legendary Janis Ian to come play in their living room. How much would I pay to go and watch (say) Stevie Wonder working in the studio for a few hours? Quite a lot.
A large committed fanbase guarantees you a diverse future income – whether it’s in the form of house concerts, CD box sets, limited edition vinyl, T-shirts, DVDs, or straight donations towards studio costs. New converts will also flock to buy discs and merchandise off you at gigs.
And since you’ll still own all your publishing rights the wonderful PRS will send you cash everytime one of your songs gets played on the radio or performed at a registered venue. If it gets picked for a film score or used in a TV commercial – bingo, more cash and further record sales from the exposure. We should all be so lucky. Like I say, all you have to be is good.
So the one time when it does make sense to give your music away for free is to help you build that fanbase. Offer something of real value (such as your last commercially released EP) in exchange for a name and email address. And continue to offer free and exclusive stuff from time to time to thank your followers for their support.
And though I take Dubber’s point about his e-Book being available free online, I’m going to cussedly pay for a bound paper copy on Lulu because I want to keep it beside my bed.
Dubber wrote: :Has anyone else here actually read Lessig’s books and articles and can point me to some of the more problematic material? Or are we just pretty much making stuff up to support our strongly held opinions…?”
Here are a few items for starters…
Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of Lawrence Lessig’s Book FREE CULTURE (.pdf)
http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop15.5freecultureanalys.pdf
The Fundamentals of Copyright for Musicians/Indies
Intellectual Property Law 101: Copyright Now or Cry Later
http://www.musiciansatlas.com/newsletter/oct05/copyright10_05.htm
(Lessig’s stunningly embarrassing defeat.)
Supreme Court Nixes Copyright Challenge
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-980792.html
Larry Lessig in the Lion’s Den
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/31/lessig_vs_authors_cisac/
On Creativity, Computers and Copyright
http://thinkofx.com/blog/?p=29
But Do Their Eyes Glow?: The Children of the Lessig God and the Viking Pirate Kings
http://music-tech-policy.blogspot.com/2006/08/but-do-their-eyes-glow-children-of.html
10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing
http://www.ascap.com/playback/2007/fall/features/creative_commons_licensing.aspx
Tom’s comments ring true for me, as do many of Dubber’s and Prof Lessig’s, though I’m not swallowing their views, hook, line & sinker.
“..serious thought and energy instead to building a loyal following. Write those blogs, answer those emails, gather those addresses, build that database, nurture that goodwill…”
Much of what Tom comments on above and indeed Dubbers E-book addresses, is regarding the role & process of promotion. I could understand if muscians take the same stance as I saw with Doctors in Hospital a decade a go. “But I’m a doctor, why should I use a computer?”. My take on this would be, if you can do it yourself, then do it, but if you’re not interested, then getting good/attractive enough to get signed is another option.
The duration of copyright seems to be a highly contentious issue. There doesn’t seem to be any wiggle-room unless you’re an industry giant (like Disney) seeking to extend the term. Allowing individuals to determine how long they seek value in having protection, to me is one way of allowing this question to be answered more effectively. If the fees raised through a user-pays mechanism were put to good use in a sensible process of enforcement that is neither heavy-handed, or an expensive farce, I think it would be better than the current scenario.
In trying to think of the range of protection as a spectrum, we seem to currently have the most protection offered, by default, as the first-cab-off-the-rank, with the price paid for rights being “no-additional-cost” and a high price subsequently for enforcement. (this is why I think so many people dislike the previous attempts of the RIAA to push responsibility for enforcement directly onto ISP’s and indirectly onto society)
Prof Lessig’s attempts to shake things up, IMO restore a bit of balance.
The existence of Creative Commons allows people to share for non-commercial purposes and acknowledges/encourages good practice for commercial use, though I am unsure if it has any more teeth regarding enforcement than Copyright. What is the cost of CC? Again it’s “no-additional-cost”, though competing with Copyright, which has a longer term, encourages rights-holders to ignore/overlook their rights for enforcement where the infringement is either non-commercial, or the infringer is not worth chasing, all of which does little to encourage respect for the rule of law.
If people want a superior set of rights and teeth enforcing those rights, than those that CC provides them, let those that opt-in pay for it iteratively for as long as they see value in protection. The current position for Creative Commons being that of opt-out of the larger set of rights that Copyright can provide is wrong and the use of user-pays mechanism is one method by which the situation could be modifed.
Incentive-wise having a much stronger set of rights at the same price (free) as the low-rights, or no-rights, distorts the rights-market, if you get what I mean.
It seems as if I’m quoting people who are mis-quoting others. Will go and have a proper look at what Lessig is on about and get it from the horses mouth. It seems as if his ideas are being overgeneralised here and I need to go find his core message.
Saying that, the ‘free’ concept, like all of these things, is only good for you if it’s good for you. At some stages of your career, free is good, at others, not so good. As long as it is part of a plan it has it’s uses, to just say that ‘all our stuff is always going to be free’ is misguided.
The great thing about running your own show is you can try things out, adapt and learn incredibly quickly. For now, free is working for us as we focus on fanbase. Limiting this later may work too as we release more material. We will see. Free is not a dirty word, just another tool which has it’s uses.
I agree with Andrew: The paradigm changes.
So what remains to be a constant in music business? There’s the product, which includes performance & composition. It’s the artists, or more generally speaking, the creative bunch (whomever that will include on the technical side). On the other side of the story we’ve got the consumer. Then there’s kind of a middleware – let’s call it the platform of distribution, no matter how many third party companies are involved (if any). There are rules and a technological as well as a economical framework to deal with the product. This includes licensing & copyright law. Anybody involved intends to get their share of money. Expect for the consumer, who’s trying to pay as less as possible. IF he’s doing so.
So everything remains more or less? No, for heaven’s sake – again I’m with Andrew. If anything’s predictable, it’s a multi-dimensional complexity which arises of any constant being altered by a multitude of parameters: technology, globalization, ubiquity, The Long Tail, individual production etc.
What’s changing in music (or media) business? Basically, anybody’s role will change – that’s quite easy to see. It’s not only the labels. And it will not change somewhere in the future, it’s already in the making. Be open minded and keep up a good amount of analytical awareness. Your tasks have changed.
Complexity arises from multiple forms of the product’s carrier (media, format, resolution, options). More complexity arises from options in the choice of distribution channels (online, offline, label, portal, aggregator, selling by yourself). Even more complexity arises when it comes to choose whether to add added value (ltd editions etc – see Tom Robinson and Julian). If that’s not enough, you can define the pricing model and strategy as an artist yourself (depends on way of distribution of course).
I guess marketing will become a BIG issue. The so-called web 2.0 applications & social networking is just the very beginning. That’s re-packaging taken to a whole new level way ahead. Now there we are again: The artist has to attract as much attention as possible (see Marcus).
Finally, the discussion above shows two crucial issues: 1) Which will be the source of revenue? (see Tom Robinson) 2) How is licensing and copyright law to be dealt with?
Core of the matter: Once there was a physical object. Now most people are fine with the raw content. Still, there’s licensing, copyrights and ownership which renders content to assets. But, given the political dimension of globalization and technological progress (ubiqitous availability on internet) – however low the price for any content (audio, video, print, software) is, the same content will emerge for zero payment. Apart from legal sharing there definately is piracy. IMO, there’s only one way to dry out piracy: Content is to be offered for free and, most notably, in highest resolution available. If there’s any better resolution legally available on physical media, be certain it will end up on the net.
I know, it’s an extremely painful process to acknowledge this, but otherwise there’s no way to beat the real profit-draining origins. It’s a pain in the ass for creative people. Consumers will get used to it. In the end, there’s one BIG question: Where does my revenue come from in the future? Marius is quite right in pointing out the artist’s main issue: “‘What’s MY model?’ makes more sense to me than ‘What’s THE Model?’”.
Content might be the advertisement for added value at least in some strategies. Licensing and copyright law has to be seriously reworked (with global focus) (I have to pass out regarding Lessig – I’ll have to read his work first…). The more far your marketing reaches out, the more people are listening to any part of your music – the more likely it is that people (and more people) are spending money for anything you created. Tom Robinson: “And great music will always arouse the same passionate loyalty in their core audience”.
Maybe this is live music or added value in any form. Whatever you’re offering as added value: it has to show your core skills which no one can copy (at least for some time). Whether it’s simply because pirates can’t copy your presence (live music), or it’s physical products which are of high standard quality, or if it’s some nice bundling. Look at which prices fans are willing to pay for limited editions or meet & greets (NIN, Duran Duran, Prince) – that’s the source of revenue. It’s the same artists who tend to give away content of highest quality for free (NIN: FLAC download, Prince: free & new CD). Now there’s much more unknown artists who rarely sell ltd ed stuff. Be creative. See Julian.
Btw, I’m NOT a musician, I’m rather the technology guy driven by his huge interest in music (and music collecting). Since in Germany there’s no legal platform to download high res audio, I have to stick with the usual suspects: iTunes, 7digital, emusic – and real CDs. I’m an afficionado regarding sound & quality. On the other hand, I’m keen to discover new acts. These I won’t find on my local radio. Nor I will find them at MTV (what does that “M” stand for?). Luckily enough I’m still sticking with a 40 DLs per month account (from a previous campaign) at emusic which only costs a mere 9.99 EUR. That’s great. I discovered many artists. And there are more than a few which I happen to buy on CD soon afterwards. Often, I end up buying the same album I already downloaded just for quality reasons!
Andrew, why are you arguing for weaker rights for creators? Why do you think this is a good thing. Who benefits?
You give up a lot of rights and flexibility if you adopt a Creative Commons license, such as the right to change your mind. Try and have a less US-centric view Andrew – moral copyright is not part of US law, but European creators value being able to say who can and can’t use their work.
Another example:
Tom Robinson wrote.
“And since you’ll still own all your publishing rights the wonderful PRS will send you cash everytime one of your songs gets played on the radio or performed at a registered venue.”
Not if you have chosen a CC license. By doing so you have opted out. Lessig was mauled at CISAC and later added an opt-in tick box to save face. But is the warning clearly displayed?
“Don’t get sucked into the Lessig / Creative Commons / EFF traps that may sound enticing to those newbie creators who don’t fully understand copyright law.”
Andrew, I wonder how many people realise the rights are irrevocable? Even Lessig can’t give a straight answer. It is deceptive to say the least.
“It’s like you’re reading my words through some sort of sinister filter.”
Having listed the examples above, why is it so hard to understand these concerns? A “sinister filter” implies a fault on behalf of the person you are talking to, which is very arrogant.
It’s quite clear that weakening economic rights means a worse deal for creators, these concerns are valid and well understood. You have to offer creators something better.
What is better than managing your property, maintaining control of your rights as you see fit and getting compensated for your own creations (through multiple avenues)?
Nothing Lessig nor Dubber have offered takes away your rights / your ownership of your creations. All that has been offered here (that I can tell) is more flexibility in how you handle the rights to each specific creation.
Is it me, or is the point being completely overlooked by many – that we are each in control of what and how we copyright our creations?
It still comes across to me that many creative type people just want their creative rights handed to them with no effort on their part to manage or control it. I mean is it really “Copyright Reforms” fault if you miss the boat on just how to handle your creations?
Is it the traffic laws fault that you did not renew your license? Or is it yours for not taking care of your own business as we all should? Were you waiting to be handed the new license without putting forth any effort on your part?
As far as I can tell you can not have your creative rights stripped from you if you are taking control of your creations, taking ownership and responsibility for them.
The truly humorous thing about all of this copyright debating is that I really believe the majority of us (myself included) having this debate haven’t garnered enough popularity for this issue to even be a concern!
“You have to offer creators something better” – STEVE (above)
For me creating is it’s own reward – and luckily I manage my creations too – so bonus for me!!
@Milton: “Nothing Lessig nor Dubber have offered takes away your rights / your ownership of your creations. All that has been offered here (that I can tell) is more flexibility in how you handle the rights to each specific creation.”
No Milton, you need to read my post again – I gave specific examples where CC means less flexibility, fewer rights, and opting out of earning what is rightfully yours.
@Steve
You are focusing on just ONE form of copyright – One form that is your choice to take on or not. If the CC doesn’t suit your needs then do the extra bits involved with establishing a more suitable copyright (incl. your publishing) – and viola! You have managed your creation and made the Choices you felt were needed to handle it – Whether it was a CC or whatever you decide.
What’s YOURS is YOURS so long as you take the steps to ensure it stays that way.
“Is it me, or is the point being completely overlooked by many – that we are each in control of what and how we copyright our creations?”
(that was me, just a while back up above)
What is it that you need specifically to feel secure in the ownership of your creations Steve?
6 or 7 posts ahead of this one I provided some links to articles in response to Andrew’s question: “Has anyone else here actually read Lessig’s books and articles and can point me to some of the more problematic material? Or are we just pretty much making stuff up to support our strongly held opinions…?”
If you missed them you might want to take a look.
This morning I came across another article to throw into the stew …
Free Music Myths I: Who’ll Profit From “Feels Like Free” Models
http://thecynicalmusician.com/2008/12/free-music-myths-i-wholl-profit-from-feels-like-free-models/
I disagree with giving away free music.
Yes, it is cheaper to make an mp3 than it is to make a vinyl record but only in manufacturing costs, not in time. *However* I think what we are seeing in the changing economic climate is that it is harder to sell *shitty* music these days. Regardless of manufacturing costs you can only sell something for what a customer is willing to pay.
The music industry is freaking out because no one is paying for shitty music anymore. Anyone who is smart about trying to make money will focus on marketing *good* music that people are willing to pay for.
I do agree that giving things away for free is a useful strategy for making money, like charging for live shows. But if live shows get too expensive no one will pay for those either!
“I am a little fish feeding just fine”
- Milton
“For me creating is it’s own reward – and luckily I manage my creations too – so bonus for me!!”
- Milton
So you neither need to be paid, nor want to be paid.
What’s your day job, Milton?
I long ago accepted i had to give away free mp3′s. The result? I’ve had little to no interest in my work. Of course free shit is still shit, although what i’m doing is not shit! (ok, i’m biased, and for the sake of argument, just go with me on this one…)
My strategy has been to do little more than stick my songs up on my website and all the obvious social networking sites. Perhaps thats the problem? But I’d heard from someone (whose initials are B L) that that’s what you should do, then tell your friends and family (who in my case are jealous bitter bastards), and if your music’s good, they’ll spread the word for you.
I tried the old email a suitable blogger route, although i think that’s probably a waste of time.
Oh and don’t get me started on the live thing, travel to God knows where so you can play to 3 bored members of bar staff.
I may have digressed from the original topic slighty here. And yeah, no one said it was goin to be easy.
I guess my question is, “whats an unsinged artist supposed to do?”
@The Blob – make connections. Real ones, the kind that have value.
@Steve,
I compose music for soundtracks, scores, cues and underscores for just about any multi-media project – be it film, TV, web, etc. etc.
I also compose self indulgent tunes for dance floors, head phones, and chill rooms.
I also do remixes.
I am also a “Creative Director”, artist, graphic designer and modest film / video editor.
I teach kids how to play drums. On rare occasions I might even teach a class or two about DAW’s.
With exception to the visual artist bits – all of those positions involve music (and actually more often than not, so does the visual artistry work).
I guess my secret to “success” is that I don’t want to be a “Star” – so my judgment skills are not clouded by fame and misfortune.
I just want to do something I enjoy and make a living at it – for me that is just about anything creative.
I have found MANY ways to make money from music. I am very sorry if that is disappointing to you.
PS – I also undercut just about any and all competition. I am not greedy – nor needy (except for the love of my wife and kids!)
PS – @ Steve
“What is it that you need specifically to feel secure in the ownership of your creations Steve?”
You never did answer my question.
Milton: Are you a member of a performing rights society?
@Tonso
I use BMI for some of my work and there are other works that I don’t worry with it. (multiple alias’)
Hi Andrew.
I agree in principle with what you suggest, but also have to echo the sentiment of other commenters about the costs of producing music vs. writing an ebook etc.
I’ve written up a brief examination of the options available to a non-touring act on my blog here:
http://synapsechronicles.com/2008/11/15/recording-budgets/
As I mention in the article, we release our music under a Creative Commons license – making it available for copying and downloading for free under certain conditions – so we’re “believers in the cause”. But I think it’s also important to look at some hard numbers too.
I’ll be following up with another post shortly looking at how we’ve further reduced our overheads on our current EP recording – but it’s still a lot of money…
We are talking about three related but separate things here: giving away promotional copies of music recordings for free; Creative Commons licensing; and copyright reform in general (mixed in to that is whether ‘Lessig is right’).
Mixing the three things up confuses the issue, makes everything a whole lot more emotive and sensational, and tends to make a lot of people cross and defensive.
On giving away promotional tunes for free:
I’m in favour of musicians making money from their music should they wish to do so. In fact, if it were up to me, most musicians would make a damn sight more money from their music than they currently do. Most musicians spend more time than brain surgeons learning their profession, and earn less than minimum wage in its application.
I’m also realistic about the range of options that people have to do that.
Meanwhile, I am not one of those people that happen to believe that creativity is a finite resource and that if you give one of your songs away, you’re tapping into something that you’re soon going to run out of.
Giving away recordings is not a business model, it’s a strategy, or merely a practice. Some people use it as part of a business model, others use it merely as promotion to draw people into a business model.
I’ve written at length about this, but if you think of the recordings of songs as ‘the product that you make’, and giving away mp3s makes you uncomfortable – or if it’s not strategically advantageous to you, don’t do it. I’m not telling you what you should do here – I’m just pointing out some things that seem to work for a lot of people and that you may wish to try.
Most musicians I’ve ever encountered do not make the majority of their income from the sale of recordings. They didn’t before the internet, and they don’t now. So a lot of people are getting very concerned about something that is, in fact, the lesser part of their livelihood – and in doing so, miss out on the opportunity to use that part to open up new avenues or promote the other parts of what they do.
Resistance to give mp3s away is sometimes perfectly understandable – particularly if all you do is make songs for sale as recordings. But there do seem to be a lot of people against it on moral grounds that baffle me – and for some, the resistance seems pathological – and there even seems to be a religious fervour about it. Not only do they not want to promote their own music in this way, they demand that nobody else do it on the grounds that it ‘devalues music!’ (which, not to put too fine a point on it, is complete bullshit).
On Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a choice that people can make with their music. I believe that far more people ruin their chances of earning money from their music by signing record deals than do by applying Creative Commons Licences to their works.
CC Licences are clear, easy to understand documents that artists enter into freely, with nobody on the other side of the table trying to rip them off or exploit their work in any way. While artists may wish to later change their minds about the rights they have applied, my suspicion is that in the vast majority of cases, CC has expanded the range of options available to artists, and not reduced it.
On copyright reform
I’ve read most of the rhetoric on both sides of the Lessig is right / Lessig is wrong debate, but it would appear that unlike most of the people on both sides of the argument, I’ve also read Lessig. I could launch into a long defense of his position, but he can do that way better than I can. Let me put this instead:
Given that Lessig’s position is that copyright needs to be reformed, the counter position is that copyright does not need to be reformed. The premise is that copyright law, as it stands is not perfect – so the counter premise is that copyright law as it stands IS perfect.
I am in favour of copyright. I am not a copyright abolitionist. But I think copyright does not do what it should for 3 reasons:
1) The social, cultural and technological environment has changed beyond the capacity for which the laws were originally written. When society changes, so must laws change. At present, the most lucrative wing of the music industry is music law, because copyright is so ill-fit for purpose, and so convoluted, lawyers are required at every step to try to make arcane laws explain and represent contemporary practices.
2) Copyright law has expanded purely in the interests of corporate entities and well-funded lobby groups. There may have been some trickle down effects that advantage some music makers whose works are currently available in any commercial sense (estimates place this at a small minority of all works) – but by and large, these blanket licences are not designed to help musicians or independent music businesses, but, let’s face it, Disney, Hollywood and the major record labels. The fact that some good people, talented musicians and entrepreneurs are able to make decent, honest money on the back of their talent and hard work in an environment set up to reinforce exploitative practices by cartels of other organisations does not make the whole system fair.
3) Copyright is a property law. That’s fine and good. But there are stakeholders in this that are not creators. Copyright is a means to an end – not an end in itself. Governments make laws (at least, in theory) for the betterment of society as a whole. One way to make society better is to have a wealth of ideas, creations, inventions, culture and art in plentiful supply and rapid circulation. This is what is meant by the public domain. One way to ensure that there is a rich and vibrant public domain is to set it up so that creators, inventors and artists are able to make money from their work by allowing them property rights over their creations for a time. This incentivises creativity. But along the way, allowing rightsholders to make money from intellectual property has perversely become the end, and not the means to the end. And because it has become an end in itself, the wealth of ideas and works we should have bouncing around in a creative culture is locked down and stored away out of reach unless there is a profit motive to make it available – which, in most cases, is just not there.
So – I don’t believe in a weakening of ‘rights’ for musicians. I believe that artists should be able to make good money for their works. But I don’t believe that the reason they should make that money is because they are somehow magic and special, and so entitled to payment forever for something cool they did 50 years ago. More importantly, I don’t believe that there are ‘lesser, non-creative people’ who should be prevented from having access to musical works unless, as a mass, they can prove a commercially sound and profit-centred motive for being allowed to have that access.
The primary reason artists should be handsomely rewarded is to encourage them – and more artists like them – to make more music.
Blanket copyrights and corporate greed conspire to keep an incredible wealth of culture from society as a whole, and the nonsensical idea that copyright is just perfect as it is (other than needing to be ever longer still) is the lie that keeps that travesty in operation.
In short, laws should support and reinforce the interests of society as a whole, and not merely privilege a cartel of rightsholders – even if doing so gives some trickle-down benefits to the independent creator of works such as songwriters, inventors and authors. Those rights should be integral to a fair and just set of copyright laws that place the cultural and intellectual benefit of society at the centre, the potential to earn fairly off one’s own work as a means to that end, and a realistic and deep understanding of the media ecology as the basis of that infrastructure of property rights.
I hold out little hope that this clears up any confusion or prevents any further willful misrepresentation of my position, but I felt it needed saying.
I really appreciate all of this input on the blog on such an important issue. It really serves to underline just how central it is to everything we do, and how complex it all is.
Hey Andrew, thanks for your great comments. Reading your comments is like reading the Bible, it’s very inspiring. I wanted to back up what you are saying about giving away free mp3′s. One thing I’ve wanted to say so many times while reading your website (it was referred to me by the New England Conservatory Career Services Office) is that old saying, “The more things change the more they stay the same.” The thing many people don’t realize is that Thelonious Monk didn’t become an international sensation over night. When Glenn Gould died, he began selling a record number of LPs. In other words, it takes time to build a large following, sometimes a lifetime. Letting people hear your music over time is a good thing, even if they’re hearing it over the radio for free, or like today, from free mp3 downloads. What’s the difference? And I’m making a lot of money teaching piano and playing the organ at a local church. I was starting to feel depressed about no one buying my mp3s from ReverbNation and other sites, but now I know that’s not important, it’s more important that people pay me for “real” things, like my time and my physical presence, like you said. Your insights are right on the money, it’s just hard for people to accept some of them. Please keep up with the RSS posts, I look forward to receiving them!
As usual agree with a lot of what you are saying Andrew apart from the need for the complete overhaul of copyright law that you are proposing.
Coyrights are the bricks of the music industry – the good and the bad and to blame them for the ills of the industry as it is is like blaming the bricks for naff modern buildings when in fact it is the architects and the planners that are at fault.
Ah – by bricks = copyrights, you mean individual pieces of intellectual property rather than the underlying laws that support those individual pieces of property?
Okay – then let’s see if we can stretch this analogy as far as it can possibly go:
Bricks are made out of clay, cement, sand and water.
But those hypothetical ‘copyright bricks’ are made out of clay, cement, baking soda, PVA glue, silly putty, milk, hydrochloric acid, Guinness, cocaine, naan crumbs, wax, paper, sulphur and shoe leather. The recipe is wrong.
In other words, while the architects may be misguided and the planners may be cynical and cunning, the buildings that make up the music industries and popular music culture as a whole are mostly falling to bits because the ingredients for the bricks are wrong – and the ground underneath is moving rather a lot right now.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bricks – but that the bricks themselves should be created from the things that create and support a strong, robust and fair – er… set of buildings.
That’s why we need to start from first principles, go back to the recipe for bricks, and see if we can’t design the best bricks to make the best kinds of buildings. Healthy ones that people can live, work and play in. Ones that suit the current terrain. Not sticky and smelly ones that only suit certain types of weird monolithic structures that forever need propping up.
Andrew … Regarding your comments about the Creative Commons, I’d be interested to know if you have any specific rebuttals to the article I posted earlier:
10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing
http://www.ascap.com/playback/2007/fall/features/creative_commons_licensing.aspx
What I guess I am missing when reading the argument against CC and copyright reform in general is – Why there is such a heated argument against it to begin with?
Yes, the preexisting system had flaws – But artists thrived in spite of it. Sure the current transition and eventual reforms will have flaws – But artists will (do) still thrive in spite of it.
Think David Bowie or maybe on a smaller scale (time-line wise) Dave Matthews – They have thrived amidst all the changes. Radiohead to Iron Maiden, Foo Fighters to Bob Dylan – They thrive amidst all the changes.
No, none of those are up and coming “new” artists but my point is that if you have something of value to offer and some brains to go along with it – You too could thrive amidst the changes.
I am no Bowie, Dylan or Yorke but to see these artists thrive in a culture described by many as “Unfair” or even “Unlawful” makes me doubt very seriously just how unfair and unlawful it could be. (Especially given all the effort put into making it “more fair / lawful”)
Again I come back to managing your creations, maintaining your ownership and not waiting around for the system to adapt to you. After all, it is up to each of us to determine what our goals are and how we will attain them.
There will always be someone with the intellect / power / ability to instigate needed changes in virtually all systems of law (just as there always has been). As time marches on and inevitable changes occur, society adapts.
It is not always pleasant (possibly quite rarely pleasant), but the change and the adaptation happens none-the-less.
And just to make sure I did not insinuate that I had actually ‘read’ any of Lessig’s work – I have not with exception to web posts / excerpts. But I have listened to him on three occasions and I am in agreement with his ideals.
I have never heard him say anything about taking away the rights of creators. I have only heard him speak of reforming and adapting the various ways to obtain various rights in a new age of technology, distribution and access.
In closing I would just say that I truly believe that everyone of us here (and I am not exaggerating) has been listening to great music all of our lives. We continue to listen to great ‘new’ music and artists across the board get exactly what they set themselves up to get – They managed their creations, took ownership and maintained it.
Sure some artists out there get screwed in some of the deals they make – Is it the deals fault or the artists?
Think of it in terms like accepting a credit card you know you should not be receiving – and yet you accept it anyway. Knowing full and well you should not take on the additional debt. It is just a matter of poor judgment.
Is your song / art worth the thirty some odd dollars that is currently required to register it? Sure it is! (Isn’t it?)
I would like to believe that the firmest most reliable bricks in the foundation are the creators themselves – and all things are built up from there. (Wishful thinking maybe?)
Thanks for your response/clarification Andrew – good points all. I completely agree it’s a strategy, not a business plan (and I also don’t understand the fear/pushback around CC either – it’s weird).
In making my previous comment I just wanted to put some real numbers behind the “earn money because of” argument (one I believe in btw).
As a band, we don’t expect to necessarily make our money back through CD/download sales (though it is one, important, source of revenue). But unfortunately for many acts, the alternative means of securing income (live performances, merch etc.) don’t add up to the $$ required to cover the cost of recording their music.
I have to admit it feels a bit weird to make money through other means when possibly the biggest expense in the process is recording (even if we remove pressing CDs from the mix). A few thousand dollars for recording takes a lot of gigs to pay off, and that’s excluding the costs of live performance (instruments, transport, rehearsal studios etc.).
Looking at it through a “business lens”, to give away something for free (which, remember, I agree with as a strategy) is a significant “marketing expense” if you get what I mean?
If you succeed and get airplay and play ever larger gigs while building your following, it can be a very successful strategy. But only if the other revenue streams add up to the thousands of dollars of recording budget – which so far my experience suggests is not as easy at sounds in principle.
Our aim is to use the “freebies” as a means of increasing our audience so we can play more and sell more stuff to a bigger and bigger audience. But, short of a break-through “hit” of some sort, it will be some time before we start to break-even on that strategy.
And that, I think, is the concern that many recording artists are raising – with the “download generation” there is a sense that the music recording is “free” when it is possibly the biggest single expense for a band.
We’re a small indie band and it costs us around $7000 to record a 5 track EP. For larger indie bands this goes into the tens of thousands of dollars for a full album (a friend’s project set them back over $30,000 – all independently financed).
(As an aside, I saw a TV panel discussion between artists and downloaders, and the downloaders had no idea how much it cost to record an album – and that is part of the issue I think.)
That money has to be recouped somehow if it’s not coming from CD sales (the “direct” revenue model) – royalties from radio and TV, merch, touring etc. are all forms of this – but each has it’s own capital and personal cost and risks. Merch requires inventory, touring has promotion and transport costs (not to mention the personal upheaval for band members) etc. – the margins on each of these can be quite low as well.
I know and accept that the landscape has changed and this is the new direction of things (i.e. I don’t have my head in the sand). But I, like many artists, are still scratching our heads a little as to how we’re meant to recoup our costs through alternate means given these constraints and realities.
But I’m still digging and hope to crack the nut eventually…
Having read Grant’s comment directly after posting mine I would like to add:
I speak from a completely self reliant perspective. I play all the instruments and record everything myself. A while back I came to the conclusion that I should take that (we’ll say) $7,000.00 I might have spent recording an EP and spend it on building my own recording facility.
I believe this is an option for bands too – but the reality is that it is very difficult to handle multiple egos / personalities owning various pieces of the recording gear. Combine that with the time it takes to learn how to mix / master and you have quite a potential problem.
But consider the long term goal – Independence!
A few years invested in building and learning to do it all yourself cuts out a considerable amount of overhead (in the long haul).
Thanks Milton – I’ve often thought a similar thing about the costs of recording. Two thoughts along those lines:
1. The bigger issue re: bands doing this is not so much ownership IMO (as I think it’s possible to work that out) but the cost of gearing up to support a full drum setup (with all the mic’s etc.). We track about 12 channels on drums alone which means a lot of mics and preamps – not to mention the live room you’d need. Still doable, but adds up quickly when considering a self-funded studio setup. We actually record live in the room – so we had an additional 6-8 channels running at once, but this could be minimised if needed to just the drums.
2. To skill up to make the most of the equipment takes a lot of time and a specialised skillset (I say that having studied audio engineering at university) – over and above practicing your instrument, doing the marketing and promo, booking the gigs etc. If you have that time you can definitely do a great job building up a setup like that, but in our situation we’d more than likely have to hire in an engineer, which is a significant part of that $7000 – plus a live room etc. ($2500 was CD pressing too, which you’d also have to factor in).
In either model there’s still a significant capital cost to recording that needs to be recouped – though the benefit of Milton’s approach is that at least some of that capital becomes an asset that grows in value each time you use it…
Grant said
> We’re a small indie band and it costs us
> around $7000 to record a 5 track EP.
As a professional recordist I say that that is just way too much. If you know your stuff and have performed it live sufficiently you can track an album in a day. Mixing will take more time, but you can probably get a lot of work done with a home-setup. Send mixes regularly in to a reasonable mastering-person for some feedback, have the album mastered and you are all set.
Grant said
> We track about 12 channels on drums alone
> which means a lot of mics and preamps.
That’s a lot of tracks, which also means a lot of time spent in the mix. Record in a good space and you’ll get very nice results with a well placed stereo overhead plus kick- and snare-spots.
Disclaimer: most of my work is recording classical music live or in live sessions, from Lied to symphony orchestra’s (6-8 mics :-) with some Jazz, New age & Avantgarde, but from my experience the above holds true for other genres as well.
One of my projects is just the perfect example of what you are writing about. Just one year ago I released “Porno Soundtracks Volume 1″ as a free torrent on Mininova.org as an experiment. Contrary of what you might believe, it not about the graphical nature of the genre, but about the music of the 70ties.
Together with two other professional musicians, I went into the studio with a laptop and a bunch of adult movie classics like Emmanuelle. Muting the sound, we watched the scenes and tried to play our version of the soundtrack. We came up with 11 tracks that captured the vintage erotica sound of the 70ties and I treated the sound in post-production to have that authentic “sleazy” feeling as well.
Now, to get back to the core of this conversation. I gave away the album for free as a torrent file, thus holding out on income from the sales of cd’s or downloads. Well, suffice to say I was wrong. Having the album available on iTunes and AmazonMP3 aside from the free download, we have seen a healthy growth on digital sales altogether. Which proves you can make money by giving away.
Did I mention we already had 80,000+ downloads on Mininova since we released it for free? This is not counting the downloads from other file-sharing networks where the album is being distributed as well. And the countless websites picking it up and giving their visitors a direct download.
As icing on the cake, and a prime example of what happens “after” you give away something – we got a license request from the producers of Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri make a Porno”. As some of you might have seen it already, the track “My Assistant will take notes” is featured right after the Star Wars scene. So you see once again, giving music away for free is lucrative after all :)
This is only part of the story, as I have had lots of great requests already for new licensing deals. If you want to know more, just visit my contact page on my website, and I’d be happy to let you know more.
Oh, if you didn’t download the album already :) Check out the website below, and if you have questions – click the website link on this post and contact me!
http://www.pornosoundtracks.com/
i can’t begin to follow this whole thread. I thought Julian’s long post and Tom Robinson’s made a lot of sense.
Dubber introduced me to the idea of giving things away and set me thinking a while back. I do so in a controlled way thru Reverbnation as an incentive to join my fanlist and a reward to those who have. Somehow, I find it harder to give songs away free (tho I do), whereas electronic improvisation music (which rarely sells anyway and there are very few ways to promote it) I have given albums away, happy just to get it heard.
After a year of quite busy online promotion, joining network groups, Facebooking, Twittering, Myspaceing, and more, I think that for me, in 2009 I will spend more time being OUT THERE again, singing and playing to real people – being a face in the friendly venue again, big and small, song gigs, jazz gigs, theremin gigs whatever – fewer “rent payers” and more gigs for ME. It is easy to lose the value of being a face on your own scene and easy to sit at home doing the right thing web-promotionwise but losing touch with real folks around you.
I will probably give more things away free – I’m lucky – I have a huge back catalogue – Giving some away in one place, and putting it up on cdbaby/iTunes and selling disks on my site is what I’d laughingly call – my strategy. :-).
@Andrew Levine: Thanks for your feedback. You’ll see in the original blog post I pointed to earlier in the thread what the breakdown is in those costs – it’s not all production, some of it is physical product costs – and also note that our second EP will cost about half as much (and all is in AUD, which is likely higher than USD equivalents). That said, I fear we’re steering into to the realm of off-topic discussion…
If we concede that we won’t achieve sales of downloads or CDs to directly offset our production costs – whether that just be because we give away our music as a promotional strategy or that we acknowledge that the perceived value of recorded music is dropping due to a change in our audience’s propensity to pay for it (or some other reason) – the basic equation still needs to be:
revenue from various other streams (merch, gigs etc.) >= cost of product for other streams (merch, gigs etc.) + recording fees
My point is that in practice this is sometimes difficult to achieve and I wanted to put some hard numbers (based on my experience) behind my argument, something that I feel is sorely lacking in many such discussions…
@Hello Frank
I’m totally with you on all of this, however
The CC license doesn’t allow for DRM to be used on any of your recordings. Which means if you have the same tracks available on CC sites as well as DRM sites the whole thing is null and void surely?
Or did you not use CC? I’m coming to the conclusion that the best way to do ‘free’ is to just do it, and avoid CC – it seems to throw baby out with bath water and can create more problems than it solves
Milton wrote: “What I guess I am missing when reading the argument against CC and copyright reform in general is – Why there is such a heated argument against it to begin with? Yes, the preexisting system had flaws – But artists thrived in spite of it. Sure the current transition and eventual reforms will have flaws – But artists will (do) still thrive in spite of it.”
Milton, you’re of a breezin’ along with the breeze … any way the wind blows … kinda guy; and, hey, that’s cool. You make a buck, you don’t make a buck … you get along – you’re happy doin’ what you want to be doin’ and you’re earning what you think you’re worth. Nothing wrong with that … good on you mate.
But, there are others that are interested in being seriously competitive and who have the talent, drive and guts to reach beyond a ‘ya, know, I just go along to get along’ kind of existence and want to take a shot at grabbing the brass ring.
You are able to live you creative life style because copyright law sets the ground rules for both you and the users of you music. Those with the most radical ideas for copyright reform (including Lessig and his cronies and disciples) wish to make your version of the creators life the ONLY version available to all.
To that end, Lessig’s Creative Commons licenses are set up to do a couple of things, 1. permanently cripple some or all of your rights, and, 2. leave you on your own to defend those few rights you may not have given away in perpetuity. Additionally, CC licenses provide no mechanism for you to get paid and leaves it up to you and potentially thousands of users of your music to determine the fees, if any, to be paid, the mechanics of how those fees will be paid and the penalties for non payment. In other words, you become one person against a world that has no interest in paying you.
One the other hand, you say you are a member of BMI (I prefer ASCAP, but that’s another story) in ‘selected’ situations. Copyright allows these organizations – and others with similar copyright driven objectives – to exist. These organizations license, collect, audit, build technologies to identify and process royalties, instigate legal action where necessary and present the creator’s perspective to government bodies.
Copyright ‘fixes’ suggested by Lessig, his cronies and disciples (and others) are aimed squarely at organizations that legally band creators together to defend rights each creator could not do alone.
And, let’s take a look at who some of those “and others” are:
The public domain industry. Works in the public domain foster large businesses that sell public domain materials. Remove the necessity to pay creators (by undermining copyright) and the public domain business will become even larger than it is. Lessig went to the Supreme Court to enhance the public domain industry at the expense of creators. Fortunately for creators, Lessig was handed the most embarrassing defeat (among many) of his career.
Other businesses that want copyright crippled or destroyed so they can enhance their bottom lines include … the consumer electronics manufacturers … radio and television broadcasters … web broadcasters … and, now, those who want to profit from P2P distribution.
Commercial users of music have been fighting to keep from paying creators for years – since copyright laws first came into existence to be exact… There is nothing new going on here other than that groups that would prosper by having to pay no – or less – to creators have a new arrow in their quiver – digital distribution which they have exploited as a reason to diminish creator’s rights.
There is no relationship, whatsoever, between creator’s rights and digital distribution – and the tools that make it possible – other than digital distribution makes it easier to violate creator’s rights.
Diminishing creator’s rights is no way address the problems created by digital distribution. Encouraging, enhancing and enforcing creator’s right is. According to an article available on the Indie Music Tech website … $800 Million was invested in legal music related technology in 2008 … that’s because most sane investors believe legal solutions that support creators will lead to the continuing development of high quality music that will attract customers over the long term.
So, in this era when the record companies are losing power and the independent artist has a chance to take control of his own destiny – who gets hurt if the Lessig approach to copyright, including his Creative Commons subterfuge, prevails? A hint: it’s not the record companies … They have, and are continuing to aggregate the greatest and best loved recorded music of the commercial recording era. They could literally stop supporting new artists tomorrow (they won’t), cut all of the overhead related to new artists, put the history of recorded music on auto pilot and be better off, financially, tomorrow and in perpetuity than they are today.
It’s the independent artist that has a shot at taking control of his own destiny that will take it in the ear because that which offers him the best shot at succeeding over the long haul will have been undermine leaving him basically defenseless and struggling for the rest of his life to remain relevant, put food on his table, provide for his retirement and cover his health care costs.
Basically, in a Lessig and company copyright world everyone is forced into your boat … including those creators whose dreams exceed your expectations. What is likely to remain the same in a Lessig and company copyright world is the 90% failure rate for aspiring artists (the public can’t absorb much more than 10% of what’s offered – although the failure rate is likely to increase as more sub amateur music is pushed on the public.). What will change for those who do ‘succeed’ is that the income will likely to capped at – or well below – what one would consider middle class.
So, Milton, much is at stake with CC and copyright reform. Creators serious about their work need to work through and understand the complicated infrastructure that provides opportunity. If you are in the business of making music, you must understand what the business side of your business really is before advocating the destruction of the DNA that offers you a life based on your unique talents to create something that may very well touch the world. There certainly is more than monetary value in that … but being compensated for something only you could have done ain’t bad either.
@Tonso -
Very well written and explained comment up there. Seriously.
All I have to say is that if the system was broken, is broken, and is going to be reformed to be still broken – then how come we have all the wonderful media out there to enjoy?
From motion pictures to music albums, from comic books to DVD’s, etc. etc. – All these things are here for us to enjoy and the folks that managed their “business” end of creativity have profited just fine. (And yes, the “Industry Heads” have most likely made off better in many cases).
I kind of come back to this each time:
If a creative person gets burned on a deal, is it the artists fault or the deals fault?
I believe it is each creative person’s responsibility to research and understand what they are getting involved in – it seems those that did are doing quite well.
Go ahead and be competitive and go for the ‘brass ring’!
The argument that artists are being cheated just doesn’t fly with me. There are too many artists out there that aren’t being cheated…And if they are / were – then I ask again: was it the deals fault?
Would any of us really get involved with a Copyright system that screws us completely? No. But we have all gotten involved in one that screws us a little – I do not have the singular power to reinvent a “Fair” system to compensate artists – But I also do not see many of my favorite artists “suffering” from the past / current / proposed future system.
The time honored system of the creator or agents setting a price and the consumer either 1) paying that price for the right of possession/enjoyment or 2) haggling when appropriate/possible or 3) simply passing so that the price comes down or the product justifiably fails in the marketplace, is not going away anytime soon. The act of creation gives unalienable rights to the creator and always will.
Everything about technology brings wonderful opportunity for creation and distribution, but we’ve enjoyed regular technical advance since the industrial revolution yet never before has a group of published and influential individuals ever advocated an overhaul of our collective sense of principle. This is well intended but eventually wrong for many reasons. That’s where Lessig comes up short.
Principle, especially those embraced by collective agreement, should not be subject to compromise. When/if online pirates become the majority and properly change the laws to “free”, not defacto “free” through infringement, only then will this new point of view have merit. Until then, industry and legislators will revamp laws to preserve principle within the new technology, and law/justice will do what is necessary for reasonable enforcement. We’ve seen this over and over in everything from shoplifting to highway speed regulation.
Never forget: this network was free, fast and clean all through the 1990′s when we all used it legally, and only the advent of piracy and infringement beginning with Napster in 2000 began this long and regrettable but inevitable march towards an online police state. The internet is brought to us–or not–by the very industries being ransacked and it is ultimately monitored/controlled through federal regulation. There is no RIGHT to internet just as there is no right to television or telephone. A minority of unethical individuals, cowardly hiding behind precious privacy regulation to break the law anonymously, is bringing the internet down and until principle no longer has value within our society, government has little option.
Music, movies, books, won’t have to be free forever and musicians will soon again be paid for their efforts. Extraordinary, unprecedented and heavy handed controlling solutions are on the horizon and principle will be reestablished, but at a tragic price to the network. A few always spoil it for the many. No news here.
…and believe it or not, I agree almost completely with “SAM I AM”‘s comment.
Moving post and comments !
@ Sam I am
“Extraordinary, unprecedented and heavy handed controlling solutions are on the horizon”
which ones ? can you explain please ? thanks…
Hi
I get to see both sides of the coin here.
I work as a DJ and club promoter, and I will happily give away free copies of the tracks I produce to anyone who cares to ask if it means that a few more people will come to my clubs and pay to watch me DJ, thereby increasing the amount I can get paid.
However, I also work for a large independent label. We sell music DVDs.
We have no other rights over the artist, and it costs us a lot of money to bring a product to market. We are not hugely wealthy, and we don’t tie artists in to long contracts; we try to be fair.
In this case, it is extremely difficult to justify giving away products for free. We try to let people see what we’re selling, and will gladly put full songs on YouTube etc, but giving away records is expensive (publishing costs) and of little use.
We are open to any ideas that bring people to watch our DVDs, but we need to pay the bills just like any other business. The simple fact is, without us, there are many classic bands who’s live performances would otherwise go unreleased, and if they were found and released as is, would never have the depth of research and restoration that we put into the release which hopefully makes them such a great product for fans.
I would really like people’s thoughts on this dilemma, and please remember that I’m not arguing for or against the idea of giving away free music, as I don’t believe either approach has been proven yet. We are still at the very start of this revolution, and I believe that the musical landscape will look very, very different in a few years.
Thanks
Interesting concept – would it work for visual artists as well? If I gave away a free hi-rez version of a painting to allow others to print out, what would happen? Or free image to download to iPod etc….
@Hello Frank
I like the approach you went with your free downloads. Offering the free downloads as a torrent while listing the paid places they can get the music and offering a full stream of the album on the site.
I suspect that the youth will have no trouble utilizing the torrent to grab a copy of the album (i did)… but the older and less technical will have no idea what the hell a torrent is and will probably will be more inclined to make an actual purchase.
I thought this was a good argument for giving away music for free: NIN’s Ghost I-IV, which can be freely downloaded from torrent sites, is also the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11947
The fact that there are now so many comments makes it time consuming to find/respond directly to the comments made and for the sake of brevity, I’ll paraphrase.
Is Copyright broken and thus does Copyright need to change?
If Copyright were a public swimming pool and filesharers were represented by people sneaking in for a free swim, it would be apparent for all to see, that there are far more freeloaders than paying customers. Does this suggest that it’s working to you and that rights are being duely respected? It doesn’t to me.
Some might suggest that it is not Copyright that is broken, it is “Copyright enforcement” that is broken, I’d suggest that it is all part of the one scheme that most of the world simply refers to as “Copyright”.
Is having creators change their stance on non-commercial filesharing really addressing the lack of respect being displayed for the rights of the creators, or really just about taking a pragmatic step to avoid criminalising behaviour that seems increasingly acceptable (ie commonplace) to society? I think if you allow non-commerical filesharing across-the-board, you put a significant incentive in front of people to avoid commercial channels, which simply turns the marketplace on it’s head and that is very bad, for it was the mechanism that modern society has been built upon (don’t get me wrong I’d prefer abundance to scarcity, but scarity is the model by which resouce allocation occurs effectively).
Having a number of competing rights regimes, that may or may not be consistent, compatible, easily & widely understood/accepted seems only to promote a breeding ground for chaos & confusion.
BTW thanks for the discussion!
Easily the clearest argument/description of why it makes sense I’ve ever read.
I’m off to blog about your blog!
;)
p.s. Hope Jake isn’t too bruised this morning….
Milton – you avoided discussing the three aspects of CC I raised. I’ll remind you:
CC means less flexibility, fewer rights, and opting out of earning what is rightfully yours.
You have a tendency – I presume it is immaturity – to personalise an issue. So what’s good for Milton is therefore good for the world. Or me, Steve. Or whoever.
For example:
… “I am a little fish feeding just fine”
… “For me creating is it’s own reward – and luckily I manage my creations too – so bonus for me!!”
Hopefully you will see how social contracts benefit many people not exactly like yourself.
What’s your day job again?
Well done everyone. We managed to get over 100 comments before it turned nasty and personal – and this is a very controversial issue.
In Milton’s defense (not that he needs me to do that) – everyone here, whether they like it or not, is arguing from their own personal perspective. Milton’s just being up front about it.
Creative Commons licencing is being misrepresented here. It doesn’t mean “opting out of what is rightfully yours” at all. What nonsense.
It simply means granting permission, in advance, for other people to use your work in ways that you specify under conditions that you get to choose – and then being utterly clear about the boundaries of that permission.
Why is this so difficult to grasp and so terrifying a threat to All Rights Reserved copyright conservatives?
And one of the points I think I raised earlier – CC is just ONE type of Copyright – Not the ONLY kind.
Did I mention “Choice”? Am I mistaken in thinking that you have the freedom to choose how to protect your creations?
Is CC trying to take over Copyright entirely? Is CC going to be the only way to Copyright works? Is it now? I could have sworn it existed right alongside All Rights Reserved?
And thanks Andrew – This “upfrontedness” (made that word up) has been a curse my entire life – Heart on sleeve and all that…
Just wondering – has there been any discussion about the people who ARE making money in all of this? I’m sure they’re having a swell time giggling their Gucci-loafered heads off while we’re beating up on each other, the consumers, the internet, etc…
Back in my day, the labels freaked about cassette tapes coming along and stealing all of their revenue by copying LPs. The RIAA went after tape manufacturers and got a percentage of every tape sale that, I believe, goes on to this day. Why have we allowed Apple, makers of MP3 players and manufacturers of music burning software to escape without too paying for the right to sell a device whose sole reason for being is to collect thousands of songs? Myspace at least offers a networking arena to make up for its millions in advertising revenue, but Apple strolls along selling music (that we get paid for) at 1964 prices and ipods (which we sure as hell don’t) at 2009 prices. The fact that most ipod owners are not paying for most of the music filling their players is all the more reason for a blanket fee similar to the cassette surcharge.
To give away or not give away one’s music maybe shouldn’t be a main focus anymore, especially since most people in the industry are already sharing their music, but rather, who are the members of the new music industry model and how do we respond to that structure so that the billions that are being generated flow in an equitable way.
Right now, musicians, writers, labels, distributors, stores, etc. are struggling to make money off of music, but there are many entities who are making quite fine livings off our work. What say we figure out who those folks are and run their little butts down?
well i think it might be good, if you do it rarely!
if you use it to push up your biz, its great!
@ John Bishop
Good question regarding just who is making money out of music these days (since filesharing has proliferated).
Reading between the lines, I think some might suggest that there is wider pool of artists connecting with an audience than ever before and whilst I suspect the likes of Dubber would suggest that this is good under the listen-like-buy process.
Dubber also seems to rightly suggest that for up & coming bands (& musical performers) the opportunity exists to take on more of the Promotions role that you used to need a label to do for you (though you might not have the network of contacts that allow you to get a foot in the door unless you’re really something), but this is not bringing money putting money over the counter, it’s merely saying you can take on more, for which you should receive a greater proportion of any revenues generated.
So heading back to where the money might be…Bands that are touring are perhaps seeing more through ticket & merchandise sales, though I don’t know if there were any established rules of thumb regarding ticket & merchandise sales to record/CD sales ratios back in the “Good-old-days”, that we can seek to compare with the current.
I’ve seen suggestion (apparently from someone in the know) that digital music shifts only 1/20th of the units that were sold in a physical medium. Now perhaps we’re not entirely comparing apples with apples, as digital music tends to be unbundled from the unit of the album and perhaps revenue is spread over a longer period under the notion of “the long tail”, but I think sales of recorded music which probably made up the lion’s share of revenue traditionally would have dropped hugely (my guess would be by 50% or more), although I haven’t considered royalties from the likes of Radio & Advertising. Actually considering Radio commissions, advertsing & listening rates, have these been impacted by the changes/improvements in the way consumers find new music to listen to? (please riddle me that Mr Dubber?)
To cut a long story short, I don’t think that even with a much wider pool of musical players, we’re seeing anywhere near the same amount of money being generated. Anyone got any links that claim to reveal what is happening in the industry back up with a solid methodology and figures?
I was listening to a podcast in which a very well regarded economist & defender of common-sense came onto the subject of the role of money which I think needs reiterating/sharing. The relevant portion of the program is approx 3 mins 20 secs into the interview and has a duration of 1 min, though the whole interview (of approx 14 mins) is interesting and may provide a bit of context about the man & his life. Here’s the link to the podcast http://is.gd/eR1z
Then I’ll re-post the following comment.
“I think if you allow non-commercial filesharing across-the-board, you put a significant incentive in front of people to avoid commercial channels, which simply turns the marketplace on it’s head and that is very bad, for it was the mechanism that modern society has been built upon (don’t get me wrong I’d prefer abundance to scarcity, but scarcity is the model by which resource allocation occurs effectively)”.
And add the following.
It’s the resource allocation that seems to become a bit distorted from a market perspective, when you move from an system based primarily on choosing what to spend your money on, to a system where the key consideration is what you spend your time on. The great flaw in this new economy of time, is that unfortunately it may not put bread on the table or keep a roof over one’s head for the producers of creative works, which actually sounds pretty familiar.
Short term “free” might be a good promotion strategy, but in the longer term (as Dubber states) it’s not a business model.
And what happens if you are musician who decides that you want to make money from sales of your recorded music? You discover the market has been wrecked by a society entrenched in the notion/ behaviour of music-for-free and happily overlooks/ignores your right to say “no” to allowing non-commercial sharing. If you happen to be a superstar you might be better off than previously when you were on the end of a sharp contract with a label that took a very large chunk (I’ll call this “the Radiohead example”), but chances are that if you’re an average muso (& lets face facts, statistically you probably are), you’re not going to be getting such a large following (not because you don’t have talent, just because you might be following your own creative path rather than aiming to satisfy a large demographic) that may make the new deal seem a bit less appealing.
So are there any figures, rules or thumb regarding how much the old music industry vs current industry made, how it broke down into types of activity (eg recorded music sales, ticket sales, merchandise sales, advertising royalties, radio royalties), or a site that I can be pointed to? I suspect none of that info would be simple to identify, would be subject to all manner of influences & assumptions, or is there a course I should be doing?
Creative Commons licence’s generally sound good to me. EXCEPT, according to this…
http://www.ascap.com/playback/2007/fall/features/creative_commons_licensing.aspx
…when you agree to a CC it’s for life! So you can’t just use it for as long or little as you like, which is a bit of a bummer if you only want to use it as a promotional tool.
The bit about anyone can use it for whatever they like is a bit worrying, so you’re buggered if some greedy corporation, or some facist party decides you’ve written their ideal soundtrack.
What’s the advantage of CC, since you can give away your MP3′s anyway? (www.frostclick.com is the only example I know of, and that’s only if they agree to take you on.)
i dont know if this has been mentioned before, but itunes is going drm free!
hurahh!
Andrew
You should start a whole blog dedicated to this issue. Every time you express your views on copyright you unleash this massive can of worms.
I’ve read Lessig. I agree with the Dubber and Lessig. I don’t understand the fanatical Lessig/CC hating. I think “opt in” devices are the right direction for copyright reform.
I recommend the book “Free Culture” by Lessig. Not only does it explain the issues of copyright in simple terms…but it’s actually very entertaining.
To: James Pew …
I agree, Prof Lessig is quite entertaining … He’s very good at tap dancing around issues that invalidate his positions …
He has stopped debating anyone who actually understands what he is talking about because he gets buried every time …
You might find this well annotated analysis of interest:
Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the Book FREE CULTURE
http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop15.5freecultureanalys.pdf
Wow! This post ranks number 1 in Google for “give music away” out of 10.5 million sites. Nice! ;-)
Why give music away for free? The answer is CC and Lessig are evil scum (or not?!) hehe What a debate! ;-)
Seriously though…
There is theory and there is real life. CC licenses extend the creators ability to manage his or her copyrights. CC does not change copyright laws, it works within the current legal structure.
I’m interested to hear why you think this post on the value of a business strategy of giving away music can turn into a debate about copyright laws? Is something broken here?
Does the current copyright regime benefit large corporations (major labels), institutions and legal firms more than it benefits the creators (musicians, artists, authors)?
Why all this fuss about rights owners choosing how they use their rights in the best way possible to suit their own business?
Finally, in his own words, Lessig admits on Colbert that the point of his “hybrid economy” is for value to be captured by everyone BUT the original creator of content.
Remix Stephen Colbert! (Video)
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/215454/january-08-2009/lawrence-lessig
@TONSOTUNEZ
People in the UK can’t watch the video on Colbert’s site. I wonder why? ;-)
Anyway I think this may be the one…
http://tinyurl.com/7howt3
Makes me not like Colbert whoever he is.
With regard to…
“Finally, in his own words, Lessig admits on Colbert that the point of his “hybrid economy” is for value to be captured by everyone BUT the original creator of content.”
I did not hear this. What did he say?
I just heard the presenter say…
“The Hybrid Economy is that everybody else does the work and the Flickr makes the money” … or something to that effect.
Lessig joked… “Don’t tell anyone…” which shows a sense of humor where nonsense is concerned.
Obviously it’s a joke though it shows a misconception.
Who did the work of creating Flickr? The company. They are the creators of the tools which enabled community. They make the money.
The contributors to Flickr don’t “do the work”, they post because of passion. The creators of Flickr tapped into the passion and created the tools needed to enable passionate users to do what they like best.
So in this case the value IS captured by the creator of the value.
The content is just not the photo the user uploads, it’s the code infrastructure which allows the user to do that.
Notice however how Flickr has to give away something, tools and space for hosting and organizing images and video, and only THEN do they make money. Exactly the idea which we discuss from a music creator’s point of view in this post.
I feel Mr Colbert may want to look again.
Makes good comedy though I won’t take him seriously as he obviously knows just enough to make me laugh at him.
Gotta laugh though! ;-)
@ Tonsotunez
I read “Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the book Free Culture” as you suggested. Here is a link to Analysis of “Tragedy and Farce:”
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080430-is-lessigs-free-culture-just-a-modern-das-kopyright.html
Here are two small parts of the “analysis of the analysis”:
“Sydnor routinely plucks statements from context to give them a meaning different from, or even directly opposed to, Lessig’s fairly clear intent.”
“All of which is to say that “Tragedy and Farce” is a hyperbolic and stunningly dishonest screed, remarkable less for any contribution it makes to the debate over intellectual property and more for the fact that a well-funded Washington think-tank saw fit to publish it..”
My opinion of Tragedy and Farce by Thomas D. Sydnor is not a favorable one. His arguments (if you can call his attempted character assassination of Lessig an argument), are extreme fanatical right wing propaganda at its worst. Instead of actually discussing intellectual property rights and the many ideas found in Lessigs book, Sydnor attempts to create a relationship, or corollary, between Lessig and various historical figures associated with the communist movement – Stalin, Castro, Marx. IMO its pretty shameful stuff that offers nothing to the debate.
@TONSO – You know that Colbert IS a comedian right? His show airs on a station called Comedy Central.
DOH! my bad, I meant @Marius
@MILTON
“You know that Colbert IS a comedian right?”
Yes, I saw that.
Lessig is clearly promoting his book and the Colbert Show is helping him out with exposure.
By the way… I think Lessig’s joke of “don’t tell anyone” was the funniest thing in that segment. ;-)
@Marius,
You should go over to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98591002 and check out that interview too. Not saying it will sway you one way or the other it is just a sincere interview via National Public Radio (USA).
You may enjoy some of the remixes of the interview on Youtube…
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmSjXmbbtQ&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CvvhDngERXo&feature=related
Could someone explain to me the above 100+ comments in more laymans terms please?
@The Blob
In really (over)simplified terms:
Some people think that current copyright law is fine because it prioritises the creator and protects the asset of the recorded work. Their position is that changes to copyright threaten the ability for artists to earn from their work. The only good change in this view is to make the term of copyright longer.
Other people think that society and technology has changed and copyright needs to change to reflect that. They also believe that the point of copyright is to create works for the benefit of society as a whole, and that locking works up for longer and longer terms prevents culture from being shared and developed.
The first position maintains that artists and other rightsholders (such as record companies) should be rewarded for and own the rights to their work above all other considerations. The second position maintains that the bigger picture of a creative and vibrant culture requires that works enter the public domain far more readily.
You can see why people get passionate about this.
@Milton
Great interview, thank you. It clarifies the situation for me and shows clearly the different interests involved in the issue.
@Dubber
That’s a good summary Andrew.
I would say I fall somewhere between the two views! ;-)
I respect the artist and music creator’s rights because I produce music myself and many of my closest friends are in the business.
It’s not easy work and it’s very difficult to make a living. We should be allowed to profit from our works and copyright plays an important part here.
I also realize the Internet changes the nature of “copy” dramatically and to try enforce copyright in the way major labels have worsens the situation.
I suspect more money can be made by artists BECAUSE of the sharing and remix culture and our copyright laws should not be used to attack this culture.
Can giving away some music help the rights holder to monetize better in other areas?
If giving away music makes sense as a strategy in your business model and you can see how your business stands to benefit from more exposure, opportunities and profit then why would you NOT do it?
Example…
I have a friend who is launching an album in March. He can launch a web site now, get some buzz going with the web site launch. He can then give away one or two tracks in exchange for e-mail addresses (free in terms of money).
He can then maybe have a competition in which he gives away a few prizes in anticipation of the album launch.
He then has the ability to notify his mailing list when the album is launched which means more potential for income he would not have had without the free stuff he gave away.
Free music gets attention which can lead to relationships which can lead to income.
A constant stream of free value such as this Blog for instance keeps me coming back for more and believe me if Andrew creates a product I would buy it.
The same counts for musicians and other artists.
You need to grow and keep your tribe involved.
Selling records is just one income stream. Giving music away can boost this income stream and create opportunities for more income in other areas of your music business career.
@Dubber
So am I completely wrong in my thinking that there are choices about how you can copyright your creations?
I thought you could use All Rights Reserved or choose Creative Commons depending on your goal, is this wrong? I thought they both existed side by side currently and I presumed it would stay that way at least in some similar form.
If the goal is for all works to be CC, then my position on this could change rather abruptly!
Milton,
Wow – then my simplification completely failed to communicate.
1. You can’t copyright your creations. Copyright simply exists when you make a work. It ‘subsists’ within the work – it’s not something you add on top. The moment you make something, you own the copyright in it.
2. The point is NOT that some people are FOR copyright and some are ANTI copyright. The point is that some people think that copyright law is pretty much perfect as is and that it can only be improved by making it more strict and more permanent. Some people think that the laws are not working in the way that they should for the ends they should be addressing.
It’s a philosophical problem (“What is the purpose of copyright?”) as well as a pragmatic one (“How best can we make sure copyright’s objective is fulfilled?”). I am utterly convinced that we do not live in the best of all copyright worlds. The mere fact that we’re having this conversation points to that fact. I also don’t believe that copyright is sacred. I think it can and should be changed – or completely rewritten from scratch whenever it becomes necessary to do so – and I think there has never been a more urgent case for that.
3. The goal is not for all things to be Creative Commons. That’s not the goal of either of the two camps I broadly described.
Creative Commons is not anti-copyright. Don’t confuse it with abolition. Creative Commons simply allows people to pre-grant certain types of permission – such as “you can use this for non-commercial purposes as long as you don’t change it”.
I don’t really understand what the confusion is here. Or, to be perfectly frank, the threat that Creative Commons alarmists warn about.
Here are two facts that you hardly ever hear, but they’re important to understand:
1) Putting a CC licence on something does not put it in the public domain. You still own the copyright.
2) You don’t have to give up any of your rights over the music in order to give it away.
In short – give your mp3s away, or don’t give your mp3s away. Whatever works for you. It’s here as a strategy – and while it’s not for everyone, it’s one that’s been proven to work time and time again.
The decision to give recordings of your music away to listeners is one issue. Copyright reform is a different issue. Creative Commons licensing is a different issue again. They are all related, but the fact that we’re discussing all three things has just ended up being confusing.
No, no – don’t get me wrong – my semantics were poor. I do understand that the “works” which I referred to as “Creations” – that the Copyright is owned upon completion.
What confused me was my interpretation of the opposing sides on the CC issue – I was confused about people thinking they were forced to accept only one form of Copyright.
I thought that folks were under the impression that they were being forced into the CC situation – and my thought was that you had the choice to use that form of Copyright or not – depending on how the creator wanted to offer their works to the public.
Sid that make at least a little more sense?
I apologize for the confusion.
I’ve just downloaded an e-book which Gerd Leonard tweeted about this morning and I’m reading it as I get time.
I think it should add perspective to the Copyright/CC debate we have going here.
The e-book is called “The Public Domain – Enclosing the commons of the mind” by James Boyle and is available as a download here…
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/
You’ll notice that the author is both giving the download away under a CC license and also selling it. ;-)
Thanks Andrew, I’ve learnt a lot from your posts, and this one is a gem. There are reasons behind why you’d want to give away free music, making connections, promotion, etc. But to make giving away music for free worthwhile, I believe that it is very important to work really hard to get to the point where you can free up your resources to give your music away for free. And also making and maintaining connections that you have already made, instead of simply giving it away without a strategy.
Thanks for your insight again.
Hi Andrew
I missed this post first time but I just love the way you drop the common sense into the ‘hand grenade’ for discussion. Your point “Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music” hits the nail on the head more than most things I have heard for a long time. As you know as We7 we live with ‘Free’ but only as a means of a larger economic equation where ‘Free’ is just a one of the variables in the model to yield revenue, sustainability and profit.
In our ‘Free’ model we have already paid thousands of artists and rights owners varying amounts based upon consumer demand
2008 was the year when ‘Free’ music distribution models started to plant their roots (We7, iMeem etc) but 2009 with be more about execution and acceptance, there are still significant challenges but these services are now extremely mature in what they give to the consumer in particular.
All the best for 2009
Steve
CEO We7
http://www.we7.com
We7 – Great Music – Free
It’s a pretty great idea to give free music as part of strategy and I understand all you guys who work hard to create it.
Look a little bit forward and use your free music to get something in exchange. Here is some example.
1. Put a track preview on your website
2. Ask for comments or news letter subscription in a simple web form
3. Once you have the info redirect your new subscriber ton the download page. Make it simple. There is a lot of free simple script on the web for that kind of applications.
You’re giving free music in exchange of something
-email adresses for mailling list
-Comments on your work
Try it
Patrick
For Performing Songwriters Only:
I’ve been writing songs and performing them around NYC for a few years now. (Many have scored national songwriting awards.)
At a recent music conference (SS Cape May), I was told that until I can draw 500 people to a show, I should be giving away my CDs, songwriting awards notwithstanding.
For my homebase of NYC, I’ve adjusted this to 50 (because along with LA & Nashville, it’s a music center, w/tremendous competition).
So now, the only thing I charge for a CD is an email address.
It’s too early to tell, but I’ve gotten great accolades on my sign-up sheets at my shows (eg, ‘Music I will support!!’).
The old axiom that no artist has ever made it big without a great live show may be less true these days, but it’s not dead.
The point is that you should view the CD as a promotional tool for building a live audience. It’s after a great live show that most people are inclined to buy your stuff.
And if you can bootstrap your draw, it attracts lots of different kinds of attention (other fans, other clubs, record labels).
At the risk of being obvious: just make sure you start with outstanding product.
The idea of giving music away for free has been debated for years and years. Indeed in the early days of mp3 and Napster this debate raged culminating in the dreaded DRM solutions.
My take on this is simple. Don’t GIVE away music downloads for FREE. What you should do instead is make a visual representation available FREE to the end user rather than giving it away to them.
Make it an advert for your narrative, your album, website etc. At least that way it is a commercial for your other ventures.
Visit me at http://www.myhotmusic.com/myhotmusic
We gave some music away free recently to quite a few people. Please see link: http://www.prlog.org/10171331-unsigned-band-breaks-into-top-20-most-shared-music-on-the-planet.html
I think no. 2 is the best advice you can give. “Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music.” In our competitive world today, we all want to make money in whatever way we could find. It’s just normal to want to charge for something that you spent time and money on. But sometimes, because that’s all we ever think about, making Money… that makes it even harder.
I’ve always believed that if you have the talent and you have the determination to go along with it, you’ll be able to make it. I think giving away samples of your MP3′s is a good way to start off. After all, who would want to buy stuff they’ve never heard of, right? If your music is truly great, you’ll make money without even trying. So I say, continue what you LOVE doing, and the rest will follow.
Great post. I definitely agree that giving your music away is the way to go. I wrote more about this topic here:
http://www.servethesong.net/lifestyle/sell-music-give-free/
We wanna make money with “give away free music”. Could you please suggest us where to get and or to do that?
Just to give the other side, (and meant to be just as provocative) Making and recording an album although I’m not going to say it takes more time and effort than writing a book is a whole lot more expensive. I would say that even just the money you spend on it is going to give you fairly large reservations about giving it away for free, and then you have the time and effort factored in also. I take the point about using the album as promotion and making the money elsewhere but in reality this is a pretty big risk to take as you have to be doing ‘very’ well to be making any money off gigs, the only real money I see in the industry at the moment for the majority of artists that may have sold up to 10000-20000 albums is through publishing. So giving away that product that you have spent thousands of pounds on is a pretty big ask with only a line of ‘if your extremely lucky you might get some further work through it’ And personally I think the music make is worth paying money for. It’s far from an extortionate amount and I think entirely justified. You pay good money for any other craft that another artist or tradesman has created…. why not music???
@ Les Hurdle “You pay good money for any other craft that another artist or tradesman has created…. why not music???”
Because it’s free via my P2P program.
…and I don’t get all this talk in a lot of the comments above about paying for recording studios. Havn’t you all learnt to record for yourselves?
Technology will kill us all in about 50-100 years, but you’re not allowed to say that
@ The Blob…. My last statement was more of a question of the principle of it all rather than a practical one. I understand that we are in a culture of downloading music for free and we need to embrace that rather than shy away from it and try and invent ways to combat it. Being a musician is a trade and a skill and it’s increasingly harder to earn money from it, I just think personally if you enjoy something as fantastic as music and a particular recording then it feels right to support the artist by paying them for making that music and hopefully enabling them to record again.
And where are we supposed to get all this free time to learn to record ourselves while working 9-5 to fund our music that everyone’s downloading for free?? ;) Besides recording equipment is far from cheap nor is a studio space to record in…. you need some money from somewhere!
Would you feel right taking a sculptors work and giving it away to someone for free? Just because technology allows it doesn’t mean that it should go on without people questioning….
I don’t want to write an essay here, but I personally think that the shear amount of free music available and the fact that it’s all available for free adds to build a ‘throwaway’ culture where the music itself can almost be taken forgranted.
I suppose I just still think ultimately that good music whether it’s recorded or live has a value and should still be paid for by the consumer.
Les Hurle wrote: “So giving away that product that you have spent thousands of pounds on is a pretty big ask”. Again I must say, spending thousands of pounds really is not necessary. If you do go that way your sentiments sure are correct, but there are alternatives. I know from several years worth of personal experience :-)
Les Hurle wrote “where are we supposed to get all this free time to learn to record ourselves”
I agree, and why deprive us recordists of living by practicing our craft? ;-)
“while working 9-5 to fund our music that everyone’s downloading for free?? ;) Besides recording equipment is far from cheap nor is a studio space to record in…. you need some money from somewhere!”
High end recording equipment is not cheap, but the main thing you require is the expertise to utilize it to it’s fullest, and for that you have to invest in time for studying and experimenting, like a musician learning his or her craft. But (here it comes :-) there are recording producers out that recognize talent and are willing to contribute their part to create great music – and not necessarily make money from the beginning, but when the quality of the music asserts itself.
It completely depends on what sort of music your making I would guess. If your making computer/sample based stuff then after an initial expensive then your costs are going to be fairly low. However if your in a band who need to write/rehearse twice a week minimum your instrument always needs maintaining and above all you really want to make an album without cutting any corners compromising costs for sound (anyone else work with 2″ tape? ;) ) There’s then getting it mastered (hopefully your label will at least pay for that), artwork costs….
Guess which scenario I come from? ;)
I don’t remember who made the point now but I really found it interesting as to whether you view music as a career (musician/composer/producer etc) or a serious(ly) expensive hobby. I think this mindset is key to how you are going to approach this arguement whether it gives you an advantage or disadvantage, because the bottom line is if your a plumber you ain’t going to fix someone’s pipes for free, if your a musician your obviously going to feel the same way. Which shouldn’t have an impact on job satisfaction either way but it would seem like good business sense no?
“A large part of Reznor’s recent motivation has been his split from the music business and his belief that in the digital age, music is a creative asset, not a commodity. Last year, free of an increasingly fractious record deal, Nine Inch Nails initially released two albums – a collection of mood fragments entitled Ghosts I-IV and then a strong new studio set dubbed The Slip – through the band’s expansive website (physical releases in a variety of formats followed). The Slip remains free to download to anyone who visits nin.com.
“A few years ago I had a bitter pill to swallow: you’re not going to make money selling records any more,” Reznor says. “That’s coming from a history of making a living doing that. Once you realise – through the fault of record company greed and bad technology decisions in the past – that people think music is free, you just have to get over it. “No one can change that. There are whole generations now who believe music should be free. You have to move forward.”
Since then, Reznor has grown evangelical about the possibilities afforded by the internet. Multi-track files that make available all the studio parts used to compile the band’s music are made available for download, with fans encouraged to make their own mixes. Recently, live footage shot at three 2008 shows was also released, allowing entire concerts to be cut together by devotees.
“I get to the point where I feel I’m finished with it,” Reznor says. “I’ll play it live, live with it, maybe reinterpret it at some point, but in this context I want people to have it. I’m not afraid of what you could find in there and I don’t care if you put the sounds in your own music. I’m done with it. There’s no secret to be lost.”
Artistic freedom, Reznor believes, is power. “Has the world ended because I gave away my master recordings online? No,” he says. “More people heard it, more people interacted with it. Mission accomplished.”"
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/music/gig-reviews/nine-inch-nails/2009/02/12/1234028200607.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Intrigued on your thoughts of what Trent Reznor is doing with his music right now.
I just wanna all of you know than computer based/samples music is not less expensive as it’s seem.
- artist paid equipment like instruments.
- songs must be write too.
- computer music could have vocal, so it need studio too.
- computer music need to mastered too.
- computer music need artwork too.
I’m currently working on an house music album production, and believe me it’s take a big budget for that.
I think it depend more on what kind of project you work on and what is you popularity. I didn’t recommand for an unknown artist to go with a big album project. Make a kind of EP, great quality, 3-4 tracks. It will cost less and you will be able to sell it the major part of time, or give them for free sometime.
I give away all my music. Even the popular stuff.
http://demiscouscous.blogpost.com
If someone with the money likes it enough they can pay me to record it professionally.
If I didn’t give it away, it wouldn’t be heard.
Create Value in your music don’t devalue it.
We are raising a culture of kids who think everything is free. Here watch this 30 second ad and we will give you a treat. At some point they are no longer consumers but bums. And we are creating this. As creative people are we so starved for validation that we are willing to undercut ourselves and each other to the point where we make nothing? WAKE UP! The majority of people that make their living doing music right now are not going to be able to find some niche, backdoor way to make a living. Andrew, I love your blog and have gotten some great promotional ideas from you but please stop sending people down this rabbit hole, there is a fox there waiting.
Hey! I have a good paid domain name at co.cc for music – freemusic.co.cc
I need your advice about build a free music site. What a best php script to run a free music site?
I completely agree!
When I made music with my band for fun we wrote a whole 46 min album for the SOLE purpose to give it away for free!
Here it is if anyone wants it!
http://rapidshare.com/files/243773098/Pure_Juniper_-_No_Diving.zip
“Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.”
- John Lennon
I hope it wasn’t out of line linking to the free download here, sorry if it was!
I tend to look at my music in two different ways, Singles and Albums. A single to me is completely different than an album and serves its own purpose, it grabs attention, it promotes the artist/album, its a first impression, thats y I think singles should be free. The album on the other hand is more personal, it’s something that I put time and commitment into to showcast my talents, ability and my creativity. It’s what i ask people to pay for.
We are an independent record label not a big bad corporation out to sue you for file sharing, we WANT you to spread our music around. To listen to the Antiqcool Music Business philosophy podcast go here
http://antiqcool.podbean.com/2010/01/22/the-antiqcool-podcast-episode-1-how-can-you-be-a-part-of-our-success/
Hey! I found this post when looking for more ways to give away my band’s music. I’m a full supporter of embracing new means of distribution and any artist who isn’t will certainly run into trouble.
The economics of the music industry are changing and for those independent artists who embrace it, these changes can really remove the financial barriers of distribution that created a large class divide between hobby/semi-professional musicians and major label acts.
That said, feel free to download ( for free! ) and share this 3 song EP from my band, appropriately titled “Pass It On” : http://tinyurl.com/taa-passiton (the link will open a .zip file)
This makes a lot of sense. I was just wondering why I’ve been seeing so many people giving their albums and EPs away for free. Thought I was missing something. I understand now. My strategy was to sell my product at an extremely inexpensive price. It’s almost like giving it away, but it allows me to order more later.
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